A large hole has appeared in the road. Police are looking into it…

Holes like this have appeared in a few local streets recently, and contractors’ vans are often to be spotted too. It looks as if Openreach’s Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) is arriving in this area!

Where I live, I am lucky enough to have service from YouFibre, a so-called altnet provider. Altnets are smaller broadband providers where the backbone is not served by Openreach. They reliably give me over 950Mbps, both upstream and down.

When I first moved here, over twenty years ago, I was excited that it had Virgin Media service. I could get 512kbps downstream (51kbps up). That seemed so fast for the time – even more amazing when the speed was doubled, and then redoubled, for no extra charge.

But since then VM’s prices have increased and the quality of customer service has declined. When my bill went over £100 per month that was more than I was willing to stomach, and so I moved to YouFibre – and so far I have no complaints!