Here is a sentence to chill the blood, if not stop the heart of anyone interested in fibre networking: "Openreach has spent millions of pounds to ensure that Cardiff boasts some of the best access to modern broadband technology in the UK, but residents in some enabled areas of Cardiff are proving slow to adopt the service."
It was penned by the good folk in the BT press office. It goes on to say that Openreach's fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) gives users access to at average download speeds of 31Mbps and uploads at 8Mbps.
And still Cardiffians are underwhelmed. The best take-up rate, in Whitchurch, is just 7%.
Wales is now looking for someone to provide universal access to 30Mbps, and 100Mbps to half the residents, probably at the cost of some hundreds of millions to taxpayers and shareholders.
Cardiff is not the only town to resist FTTC. Openreach's "superfast broadband" progranme director Johnny McQuoid told The Register that residents of Haringey don't want big new fibre cabinets cluttering their streets.
Before BDUK or the RDPE or Defra or anyone else spends one more penny on broadband, they should find out why Cardiff is proving so resistant.
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Maybe a few reasons:
1 It's a VM area so those customers are unlikely to change.
2 Only 2 well known ISPs and people may not want to change ISP as means losing their ISP email address.
3 It has lots of LLU with good speeds for most people. Despite what some say many people don't need more than a few Meg.
4 It's early days.