Final Result

We Did It !!

We, the Burley community, achieved our ultimate goal of now being included in the planned rollout of telephone exchanges to be upgraded to Superfast Broadband.

Due to the high level of interest displayed by residents, we have been selected as one of the ten locations to have its telephone exchange upgraded to Superfast Broadband, as a result of BT's "Race to Infinity" campaign.
This means that we now have priority over the exchanges already selected for upgrading and are likely to start to receive the new service from Spring onwards of 2012. This follows a 3 month campaign led by the iBurley team, and a further 4 weeks of intensive negotiation with BT after we achieved ninth position out of 2,495 contenders, although we received the third highest number of votes.

The decision to include the top ten contenders (as opposed to the initially planned five) was taken by BT at the end of January 2011, and details of the actual registration process to subscribe to the Superfast Broadband service (called Infinity) are eagerly awaited. As soon as we have more information we'll naturally keep you informed through a series of new pages on this website.

Meanwhile, let's all congratulate ourselves on being the only exchange in the North of England to have achieved this significant milestone, by way of BT's "Race to Infinity", in the advancement of technical progress.

Investment by BT is "well in excess of one million pounds".
Cost to the community, by way of an initial grant from the Parish Council, was £99.

Now that's a bargain in anybody's book.

How we did it

Having watched six exchanges achieve the improbable results of 100% support from their communities, the iBurley team decided to contest the results, and in alliance with two other disappointed locations lodged a complaint with BT over several issues. Viewpoints and attitudes differed considerably, to the extent that one exchange was threatening legal action, a situation that was deemed by iBurley to be completely inappropriate.

From the very beginning of the Race to Infinity, the iBurley team had been in constant and amicable communication with both BT and its advertising agency, and it was decided to progress our case based upon those same principles.

The team member who took this seemingly impossible task onboard negotiated long and hard, putting our case forward in a logical and determined manner, and without any hint of threats.

Although the iBurley campaign team was responsible, in part, for the outstanding number of votes obtained, it is actually down to our negotiator that we (and the other three exchanges) were elevated to a winning position, BT having now included the top ten exchanges in the winners' category.

For which we all have a debt of gratitude.