Better Broadband - Hopes Dashed
The topic for the March Joint Parish Council Meeting was the future of Broadband provision in the local area.
The current service was very variable and for people living some distance from Denton's green cabinet, located at the junction of Danacre Road and Church Hill, very slow and very frustrating.
Karen O'Kane, who lived in the village at the time, headed up the County Council's team working with BT to provide improved internet access across the county. She told the meeting about the challenges of updating the current copper-based telephone network to support a fast broadband service.
The Council's objective was to extend a fibre-optic cable network from every local exchange to improve transmission rates towards the national standard of 24 megabits per second. Final links would continue to rely on copper wire connections so that the actual speeds achieved would depend on the distance of each property from the local distribution cabinet.
It seemed there were many areas of the county with a worse service than Denton and they were being tackled first. Karen was unable to tell the meeting just how long users of the Homersfield exchange would have to wait, but it was clear that "Better Broadband" was some way away.