Thursday 7 June 2012
NGA deployment halted in Kensington and Chelsea
Openreach has ceased deployment of fibre broadband in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. This is unfortunate but we were left with no option after having the vast majority of our applications rejected by the council.
Other councils, including those of neighbouring boroughs, have shown a greater eagerness to enjoy the benefits of fibre broadband. We will therefore re-focus our engineers' efforts in other areas where planning authorities have taken a positive approach and are keen to ensure their residents and businesses can benefit from this technology.
Coverage of this story appeared today in City AM, which reports the Borough's risk of becoming a 'technological backwater' as a result of this move.
Openreach has installed a small amount of network equipment in the Borough already, amounting to 12 cabinets. Currently one of these cabinets is Ready for Service. We intend for those end users already live to remain so and will continue to make the remaining 11 cabinets ready for service, as the work has already been done, and we do not believe it would be fair to residents for us to remove the equipment.