First of all, thank you to everybody who came to see us at the drop-in event, we all felt we got a lot out of it and we hope the people who came did too. Also thanks to the people who couldn't make it but are still interested in information. We really appreciate everybody's patience and I hope this update is reassuring.
Great news just in - Sky have confirmed they will start their work on the cabinet at Manley Village Hall on W/C December 20.
As you know we'd been waiting for Sky and Openreach to bring fibre to the cabinet from the local exchange. As ever, national and world events continue to affect us in unexpected ways and it was a surprise to us all when we were informed there is a nationwide shortage of telegraph poles and this was causing a delay here.
We'd been planning to combat this by installing the fibre ourselves at our own expense and were waiting for the permission to do this. But apprently, poles have been found and Sky are ready to get started.
Elsewhere, work has been progressing well on the landowners' fields where we currently have permission. Our aim is to get as much of this work done as possible until winter weather stops play. This is when we'll turn our attentions back to home installations - installing fibre duct at customers' properties and bringing these connections back to the cabinet.
This means our teams will be a lot more visible again but we'd like to assure everybody that given the recent developments and renewed COVID restrictions, we are making every effort to keep our customer's safe and just as importantly make everybody comfortable with our presence.
We'll be sending out details of the measures we are taking later this week, but the over-riding message here is that we won't do anything our customers are not happy with when it comes to contact.
Finally, we're still waiting on the final go ahead from the Government's DCMS (who manage the gigabit voucher scheme). We can't make customers live until we receive this as it will make them ineligible for voucher funding. The funding is the the very reason we are able to build our network without passing on any build costs charges to our customers, so it's important we follow any guidelines and instructions here to the letter.
While this approval process has been lengthy, we're pleased with the progress we've made here. Once, the work has been completed at the Manley cabinet, this green light from DCMS will be the final piece of the puzzle.