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A useful new interactive map has today been published by Thinkbroadband, which rather handily provides a visual overview of broadband related roadworks across the whole of England and thus helps to see who is building near to your home. Plans are also afoot to expand the map’s coverage beyond England.
Figuring out who is building new broadband networks nearby has always been a bit of a hassle. Services like Causeway’s One.Network can help, but its recent moves toward commercialisation have somewhat restricted its usefulness, and there are limits to how much you can filter the results for telecommunications related works. More recently, the Better Internet Dashboard has also proven to be quite useful.
The good news is that Thinkbroadband have now added a new “Telco Roadworks” layer to their existing map, which groups such works into several selectable categories related to Openreach, Virgin Media (inc. nexfibre), KCOM, mobile operators and other telcos (i.e. alternative broadband networks).
In each case it’s also possible to filter by the status of the works (i.e. Planned, Cancelled, Completed or In Progress) and, if that wasn’t enough, you can look both forward in time by 40 days and backwards in time by 14 days (currently limited to 8 days). Once you have the results it then becomes possible to zoom-in and click each bit to see the details of what is occurring.
Suffice to say that we really have to credit the work Thinkbroadband has done here, as this is an extremely useful tool. At present, it’s only showing data for England, but they’ll be looking to expand that to include Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland “over the next few months“.