BT has defended its siting of broadband cabinets in the Dundee west end conservation area after a councillor branded the installations a “blot on the local landscape.”
Fraser Macpherson was speaking after Dundee City Council agreed to let BT construct the cabinets at Magdalen Green, West Park Road and Perth Road.
He said, “I don’t think anyone objects to the provision of superfast broadband, but are the boxes housing the cabling appropriate for conservation areas? There’s been absolutely no attempt by BT Openreach to provide a box that has a heritage-style appearance more in keeping with a conservation area.”
He added, “A large national company like BT should take account of the appropriateness of its street furniture for the setting they are placed in, and these big ugly boxes should not be sitting in the city’s conservation areas. There are alternative styles that are more appropriate, and I call on the company to consider these.”
Openreach, the BT division installing superfast broadband, has worked with Historic Scotland, local authorities and conservation groups to find solutions to siting street cabinets in conservation areas without diminishing their aesthetic appeal, and there are technical considerations to take into account.
A spokesman said BT supports the UK Government’s vision of creating the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015 and have pledged to invest £2.5bn to deliver superfast fibre broadband to two-thirds of the UK by 2015.Investment”No other company in the world is investing as much in fibre without either public-sector support, or a regulatory environment, which allows the company to make far greater returns,” he continued. “Over the course of the programme Openreach is installing 30,000 cabinets, connecting 200,000 distribution points, enabling more than 1000 exchanges and laying over 50,000km of fibre enough to stretch around the entire world.
“BT is deploying at twice the pace of Deutsche Telecom, AT&T, Verizon & Belgacom and more than three times the pace of peers in Japan and Korea. It has doubled the number of its apprentices to 500 and last year trained nearly 1500 additional engineers to work on what is one of the biggest engineering programmes under way in Europe today.”
The spokesman added that the importance of the technology to the nation’s business community was emphasised by Dr Lesley Sawers, chief executive of the Scottish Council for Development and Industry, when superfast became available to more than 100,000 Scottish homes and businesses last autumn.
She stated, “BT’s roll-out of superfast broadband is essential to Scotland achieving its potential in the global economy. Our ambition is for the value of Scotland’s exports to double by 2020. Providing enhanced connections from Scotland to the rest of the world is a critical factor in achieving this.”