Today, contractors fed fibre optic cable all the way from Scalford Road up to our cabinets on Main Street using this quite wonderful contraption (above) – a cable blowing machine.  The black cable on the right is the fibre and the black/green cable on the left is the sub ducting, into which the fibre is fed by compressed air from a large generator.

That’s the compressed air generator on the left and our fibre, coiled up ready to go, on the right.  The contractors did this work from half-way along Holwell Lane, pushing 1km of fibre in one direction towards Scalford Road and then the other 1km in the other direction towards Holwell.

I’ve been advised by BT that it will take about 2 weeks for our cabinet to become live (around the end of April).  You will then be able to place your fibre broadband upgrade order with BT – other providers may take a couple of weeks further to come on stream.

After you place your upgrade order, engineers typically take 7-14 days to install the service, so we’re looking at around mid-May for the first of us in Holwell to be using superfast broadband.

I will email everyone in the village when our cabinet is live and probably do a leaflet drop through your letterbox, too.

Finally, let me clear up one common misunderstanding – although it is BT which has put in the cabling, you don’t have to sign up with BT to get fibre broadband.  Other providers will be offering service, they might just take a little longer to come on stream.