Issue - meetings

That Miss Alwen Williams, the BT Regional Director for Wales be thanked for her attendance and the detailed presentation which she delivered to the Committee.      

The Chairman introduced Miss Alwen Williams, the Regional Director of BT to the Committee. 

                        Miss Williams provided a detailed presentation which covered the following areas:

• Wales Progress
• Flintshire Progress
• Local Authority Coverage
• And what about those not covered by Superfast Cymru
• New Residential Developments

The Chairman referred to businesses on the Hawarden Business Park and raised concern about problems that were being experienced because of lower speed of broadband than other locations also on the Hawarden Exchange.  He said that this appeared to be because two services could not operate the same service in the same place and he spoke of a housing development on the other side of the road that had fibre to the cabinet enabled.  In referring in particular to Cabinet 26 on the Hawarden Exchange, he asked when the Cabinet would go live.  Miss Williams confirmed that public money could not be used to overbuild where other publicly funded networks were already available and advised that she would discuss the concerns raised with the Superfast Broadband Development Team.   

The Chairman also commented that he was aware of some areas where developers had put in a broadband service as part of a development which locked in the householders to the developer’s choice of broadband provider.  He went on to raise the issue of nuisance telephone calls which could be alleviated by the use of a device which identified the caller and prevented such calls reaching the recipient.  However he explained that a problem with this was that any calls from Flintshire County Council would show as ‘number withheld’ and therefore these could not be identified.  Miss Williams said that nuisance calls were an increasing issue and recent changes had been put in place such as the development of devices to remove such calls but added that she would need to discuss the issue of calls from organisations such as the Council with the appropriate BT team.  She also provided details of a service which could assist in the removal of nuisance calls by asking the caller to record their name to let the receiver of the call know who was calling; any calls that could not give a name would not be connected to the receiver. 

Councillor Arnold Woolley sought clarification on whether any guidance was available from Welsh Government (WG) for Local Authority Planning Committees on the inclusion by developers of the provision of a broadband service within major housing developments.  Miss Williams advised that developers could now work with Openreach to include fibre connectivity as part of their housing development. If the developer did this, the householder then had the choice to pick their own service provider to provide their fibre broadband service. .  In response to a further comment from Councillor Woolley, Miss Williams spoke of regular meetings that WG held about broadband exploitation and of a five year programme by BT that was in place to ensure that enough guidance and information was available for businesses to make the correct choice about the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 102