UPDATE as at March 2022.
The Pledging Process has been completed and the fibre has been installed in the village for this project. Residents are encouraged to contact their Broadband suppliers to arrange for their homes to be connected to the new network.
With huge thanks to Andy Hay and Al Mundy for their initiation and execution of this important milestone project for the village.
This webpage will be taken down in June 2022.
Background
This important project is being coordinated by the Parish Council. To fund this project we need residents to pledge their Gigabit Voucher. Read on...
Fibre is the future. The government is keen to replace the copper wire connections that currently serve as the conduit for phone calls and the Internet, with fibre optic cables. Zoom calls, Netflix, Sky, iPlayer, the weekly shop, high definition computer games - put simply, a copper wire cannot cope with all this data traffic, which is why, at busy times of the day, the internet coughs and splutters.
To enjoy truly high-speed Internet with no limit on the number of users, the connection to your home needs to be upgraded. Replacing copper wires with a fibre cable will help future proof your home or business. Ten years from now a home without a fibre connection will be viewed in much the same way as a home in the 1930s without electricity. When you come to sell your house in the future, a fibre connection could help clinch the sale.
Your Parish Council is working with Openreach to enable the transition from copper to fibre, installing gigabit-capable broadband. If all goes well, the new service should be available later this year or by early 2022, initially delivering broadband speeds of up to 330 Mbps (Megabits per second) and even higher are expected in the future.
This OPENREACH VIDEO explains it all in under 2 minutes!
So who pays?
The cost will be funded through the government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme. Every home and business in the village will be offered a ‘Gigabit Voucher’ with nominal values of £1,500 and £3,500 respectively that can be pledged to fund the work. This funding will be available until 31 March, 2021.
How will it work?
Openreach will run fibre directly from the exchange to distribution points in the local roads using existing poles and conduits. Assuming you pledge your Gigabit Voucher, you will be expected to sign up to a Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) broadband package with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) of your choice. The ISP will then make the final connection to a new hub or router in your house. Your subscription may increase a little, by maybe £10 a month, depending on which speed option you select.
If you decide not to take part, your existing broadband service will be unaffected.
PLEDGE YOUR VOUCHER NOW! by going to www.openreach.com/connect-my-community
Please support our East Clandon FTTP project by visiting this Openreach page to pledge your Gigabit Voucher and set us on the way to ULTRAFAST RELIABLE BROADBAND for the whole village.
PLEASE DO KEEP PLEDGING while the pledge portal is open, even though the Openreach page shows 100% of target met. If you pledge, then the cost of fibre installation up to your premises is covered. If you do not pledge and later decide that you want Fibre To The Premises broadband you may have to pay an extra installation charge. This could be substantial for some properties.
Additional pledges may also benefit our community. They could provide leeway for any villagers who are too slow, or fail, to respond positively to an email from DCMS (the government department) asking them to validate their request for a “virtual voucher” and agree to the terms and conditions of the voucher scheme.
Note that you will not receive any money personally from a claim for a voucher. Openreach can only claim voucher tokens on our behalf to meet scheme costs originally agreed with DCMS.
Openreach Terms and conditions apply. Read them here.
Once sufficient pledges have been registered and validated the project will move into the Openreach delivery queue. The engineering lead time will be in the order of 10 months which means you could be enjoying high speed internet by Christmas 2021 or early 2022.