jnorris235

But I was told that tho the Council had promised 95% coverage, BT had only estimated, and allowed for, 20%. Hence when I got my fibre in after 5 months of constant problems - and I was the only house off this manifold (post) - the house next door couldn't get it at all because they'd oversupplied!! What a nonsense.

I requested a meeting with the Cabinet member and the head of the Fastershire project which we had this week. I will be writing a full post shortly. Basically the project will be finished (phew) within a year of the promised date (due to surveys and planning how to reach such a scattered population) and is being delivered at least as well as promised. Hope to have a full report by the weekend on my blog. These last few weeks our broadband has come to a complete halt most evenings, but maybe I can get over a megabyte, two or even twenty four by Christmas!

Economic Development Officer Economic Development Herefordshire Council PO Box 4 Hereford HR4 0XH For every £10 spent with independent businesses in Herefordshire £8 stays in the county, for every £10 spent with the national chains only £2 stays in Herefordshire. Source: new economics foundation / LM3 This is their signature! After they built the ESG!

Email to Graham Powell: Nearly two months ago I asked BT where they were working, putting in the Fastershire broadband. I got this reply: "Each Future Exchange shows the year it will be delivered. This doesn’t mean that you will necessarily have to wait until the end of that year to benefit from faster broadband. At this stage the exchange area will go through a period of detailed survey work which enables us to plan the network for your area. Once this work has been completed your exchange area will be marked as coming soon and will provide you will a more detailed timescale for delivery of faster broadband for your area.†I also commented that my local exchange wasn’t on the map, but a new one had appeared with its name in a completely different location. No response. You’ll forgive my eagerness but if this work is indeed to be completed by 2014, somebody - BT, you, god forbid even the public should know the planned strategy by now? I wrote to you asking, as the Cabinet member in charge, if you knew where they were working. After all, it is due to be all delivered this year - surely someone knows where the crews are working, and where they will be next. You didn’t know either but offered to put me in touch with Natalya Silver (I hope I have her name right). I replied on January 29 that i would be obliged to you if you would do that. I am still waiting for this contact nearly two months later. My broadband speed tonight is 0.18Mb/sec which is a joke, but fairly normal. Unbelievably the upload speed is higher at 0.28Mb/sec! Questions I wonder how long each stage takes - detailed survey first - then whatever further stages of planning and delivery there are. They have in theory been planning upgrades for many many years, so they have told me, so I cannot believe that some more answers are not available! I also wonder that when the exchanges are updated how long it will be before customers get the actual broadband speed promised. Lastly, again - where are they working, on which exchanges - what is the rollout plan, please?

Incidentally, I was told "down the pub" that a 44 tonner would be arriving today having been GIVEN the entire contents of the BlackFriars building for free. Obviously good money could be made from the contents, and the guy doing it, though happy, was incensed that we were giving stuff away. Maybe no one else made an offer - though some of it will go to a good home (believe it or not, another school that WASN'T given a grant to start up!) - maybe no one else was even asked. Maybe it's who you know!

The Council have about 30 odd current domains. For each one they buy the .com, the .co,uk and the .org to avoid any spoofing. They also only use many of them for a few years but they keep the domain ownership for 5 yrs plus so that none else can take over the name and spoof the web site - or even, god forbid, use it to deride the council! I have the list somewhere with associated costs etc. This is one department where I get all the answers I want and indeed am now on the Digital Strategy Task & Finish Group group (part of a Scrutiny Committee) which is far wider ranging. I believe the City Council has a new web site coming at some enormous cost - again contract given to an outside firm? And before you ask, yes I know what each of those capitalised words mean individually .... but ..... Apparently - HereYouCant? PS I have owned herefordshire.com for twenty years - any ideas what to do with it? I pulled it apart last November and just used it as a campaign page.

Did wonder why the council was handing money to BT, but it was the deal to do matched funding. As a punter I was desperate to get BT to actually do something now they got the UK monopoly. As a Councillor, I agree it should be market funding because grants mess up the competition and stifle development in many cases. Will dig, great for your support, and more to learn about Natalya. You give me the bullets and I'll fire them!

Dish is the answer. Just been waiting year after year on promises from BT and now seems so close! Jonny - you got more info than BT knew! Cheers all.

Rude words are all that come to mind! How much do you pay for that. I bet you've even downloaded films and watched iplayer! Still, annoying that the cabinet member doesn't seem to know what's been done or being done, will dig more. Main A49 and no cable tv, 3G, or proper broadband. Think we're being stuffed? Garway are getting it before us!

I thought my language was bad! Me, wife, two kids, iPads and a computer ... One dongle ain't enough. But if I couldn't trust BT to deliver I might have to look at a dish for £25 a month, true. Anyway, out in Much Birch I have 2g, not 3G so a dongle won't work either. Have asked where the 6 new mobile masts are going in the county, but again, nobody knows.. One in Ewyas Harold so far though.

Infinity? As a mathematician what definition do they use for that service then? I live at Much Birch. Regularly off line for several hours, sometimes down to 46kbps. Never been able to watch a YouTube video without waiting for buffering, usually 4-5 minutes. But, why have they not got a detailed plan of where they are working and what is next? We've had ten years of surveys, online requests as to who gets it next and so on. Then they get the national monopoly and ..... Transparency? Huh! Bad day at the office for me, sorry, after reading the endless misery in the HT!

Has anybody any news on faster broadband in our county? Anyone seen any engineers working? Please advise because I can get no detailed answers from the Cabinet member or from BT. They even admit they have no plan yet, and still promise certain exchanges will be done in 2014. More including letters and replies on jonnorris.co.uk

Why do I bother? Sorry for a moment of depression. Page after page in the Hereford Times of cuts and misery yet they still are building a bypass? WE CANT AFFORD IT! My first full council meeting and no discussion on votes of anything important whatsoever except making sure our names aren't recorded when votes ARE made. ‪#‎makesyousick‬. But I repeat my real sympathies go out to CAB being kept on hold for months. More misery on jonnorris.co.uk as I hassle BT for wasting our broadband money!

Dreadful news about CAB. If you've ever run a business or a charity and been told for months you are losing your funding, so you waste time fighting, trying to keep morale up, and then the b***ers change their mind - you know they'll probably change it back again. Demoralising. Well done CAB for struggling on.

Nope, no minutes. Just, possibly, misinformation. But its an old political argument about money for here and money for there, then you find out it is money just being shifted - in this case from assets to revenue. Still. Next problem?

Not sure yet how to get hold of minutes but will do tomorrow. However now confirmed that it was clearly understood by many of those there that this was some sort of grant. However it was some sort of extra that BB needed to get over the worst of the raids before their actual contract to maintain could be seen to have any effect. So the council coughed up another £20 million. Will update on my blog cos I'm also mystified as to how jobs are prioritised if U class roads with a couple of houses get resurfaced when there are still plenty of potholes damaging cars on well used roads.

Here's something from today's Scrutiny meeting on the budget. The £20 million pounds of NEW funds that had been obtained for Balfour Beatty to up the ante on these roads and potholes is NOW coming from a mass sale of as many Council owned assets as possible in the short term. Out of £100 million which we (you, us!) own the Council will sell off £20 million a year, every year at least for the next three years. At a meeting held by BB and with the Chief Financial of the Council for all our parishes to attend, we were distinctly told this was NEW money. Can I have support from those present at that meeting please, because they're denying saying it. Or did I mishear?

This is me, not ioc [sic]. I thought I was being positive considering it looks like a prison from the outside! I was looking at the webcam because I wanted to. Odd that! The link was in the post I was replying to.

Over the last 5 years - I wonder how many web sites the Council has had, paid for, and discontinued (such as faster4herefordshire.com). Several years ago I was told I'd failed in a bid to write one for them because I had come in under their advised limit. They were looking for quotes over £5000 and I had quoted £3000. So - tell me, anyone who writes web sites - how can hereyoucan.co.uk the latest Council web site possibly have cost over £20,000? Be clear - the brief alone cost £15,000. This was JUST for writing it - seen how much is on the site?? >>the development of the electronic website to enable easy access to businesses and community to the toolkit, guidelines and examples for use. The total cost to design, host and manage the interactive website is £21,821.25. <<

Out of place, out of time, doesn't fit into Hereford at all, but the animation almost makes it look good! Anyway, point is - the webcam link don't work! Any ideas?

Thought I'd read up about Business Rates - can our Council actually reduce them? I know they keep a percentage (25%?) of any extra new revenue. So I thought I'd use the link from megilleland...perhaps they recognise it!!!!

Hey! Only trying to match you, but you know things that I don't. You know what youre talking about, too. Seriously, was that the question? I'd love to find out, and will try cos your point was well made. Ill be gentler next time with you, or maybe just let the brakes off your pram when the traffic lights stay on green forever if Colin gets his way! But just trying to jostle some ideas out because you're not the only one that just shouts at councillors! I did that for years, and certainly would never vote for one, til now. Feed me ideas and questions before I'm subsumed! Night for now, the pub beckons!

Not everyone, bobby47, is on this forum all the time. So no toys out of your pram, or you know you'll be done for littering with intent. As you know, I'm fresh off the Christmas tree, but having done the electoral roll job of going round those who illegally (£2000 fine) have not filled in their form each year I have met a lot of foreigners (I can call them that can't I?). In the rural area my experience is that people like the Poles, for instance because none else wants those jobs (apparently you mustn't mix them up with East Europeans). And they work hard. Some get exploited but still work hard. What I never understood was that whatever I spoke to the electoral roll office about the fact that the Council central money is worked out on the number of people on the electoral roll, I could never get them to correct their records, or catch these people. Wasn't worth it, they said. ??? Excuse me? It's your job! But then in this last election I couldn't get a single one of them out of their office to ask a pub to be the Poll Sation again as usual, or visit an impossible to use (John Jones' own words) Polling Station that had no disabled access whatsoever! I'm not UKIP either, I just want someone with primary school arithmetic skills to actually count who comes into this country! You know, maybe a computer or something? I always get held up for hours on the ferry to France having my passport scanned - the figures are there surely? Tesco's knows exactly what you've bought, how come these figures aren't there somewhere? Or will it cost another billion to devise a software solution to actually count stuff? So - what's all this repetitive "No, Councillor dares touch this issue?" I get peed off with this constant Councillor bashing. Why don't you use the Freedom of Information Act - I may be wrong but I thought that anyone could do that. Or at least ask a specific question of me that I can put to the correct Officer and demand an answer? The power is in your hands....so? Forget the whinging, you make an excellent point - the question is what - this? >>Exactly what is the population of Herefordshire, if not born here when did they arrive in this county, and where from? Yorkshire, Poland, Scotland, Rumania, it doesn't matter.<< Is that it?Tell me!!

This traffic is way beyond a joke. Trying to force car drivers off the road, upping petrol prices, blocking all pull in areas on the A49 so tractors can't pull over, buses changing times so often you can't remember when they're coming, ludicrous car parking charges, silly speed restrictions on some parts of the main road yet NO speed limits on country roads, no bypass, no bridges, expensive bus fares, no GPS on buses so we can tell where they are with an app. - everything done to force us out of our cars. But no alternatives. More housing estates but no more buses. Shame you have to slag all councillors off. Some of us do suggest alternatives, fight losing battles, and the majority vote with a chairmans casting vote as well can do what they like. So where are the ideas? What are the answers? Cross town mini train may solve intra city movement, as apparently only 15% of traffic goes from north of the city through the south of the city (and vice versa) and on.

Colin, I've been watching! I see you bought it. Launch it at Jim's do? See you Monday. I'll be the one in the mask. Secrets, eh? I smell Victory... Sshhhh.