The observant among you would have noticed BT Openreach and its contractors digging up a fair number of roads and pavements in South Molton. That’s because they’re laying the foundations for superfast broadband.

The yellow stars on the map show where superfast broadband cabinets have already been installed and the red ones where they’re about to be installed. Green means that they’re live (only one of those at present – in Pathfields).  I’ll try and keep this map up-to-date. UPDATE: 19/06/15 Duke Street added.  We now have to wait for the cabinets to go live. I suspect that will be in about six month’s time. But who knows.

Standard BT cabinets have copper wire from the cabinet to your home or premises and copper wire from the cabinet to the exchange.

Superfast Broadband cabinets on the other, although they still have wire to your home, have fibre-optic cable to the exchange. Unlike standard cabinets, these cabinets have to have a power supply to work the electronics that converts the pulses of light that travel down the  fibre-optic cable into electrical signals that travel along the copper wire.

This means that the pavement and roads need to be dug up to lay the optical cable back to the exchange and to connect the cabinet to a power supply.

Given the number of power outages we have in South Molton I wonder whether those with superfast broadband will suffer more broadband failures!

Having just looked at the Connecting Devon and Somerset website it appears as if superfast broadband on the Pathfields Estate is now live! The BT website confirms that orders are being taken for premises at Pathfields. Having taken a closer look it appears that all the premises on Pathfields, as well as the Riverside Caravan Park and the Adventure Centre on the other side of the Link Road, have access to superfast broadband.