Business Broadband and Telephone Systems in Luton

Luton's exchange was never upgraded

Openreach has named exchanges across Hertfordshire as Full Fibre Priority Exchanges, which happens once roughly three quarters of the premises they serve can get full fibre. Hemel Hempstead, St Albans and Watford have all been through it.

Luton has not. The only restriction in force here is the national one that stopped the sale of new analogue lines in September 2023.

That is not a reprieve, it is a symptom. It means full fibre has not reached enough of the town to trigger the threshold, which is precisely the situation the businesses described below find themselves in. The 31 January 2027 deadline applies here in full, regardless.

When there is no usable fixed line at all

One of our clients is a food business on the edge of Luton Airport. You would reasonably expect somewhere on the perimeter of an international airport to be well connected. It is not.

They can get neither full fibre nor fibre to the cabinet. The only thing Openreach can supply there is SOTAP, the copper product for premises that can get nothing better, which in practice means the sort of speeds people were complaining about fifteen years ago.

We solved it with a Starlink satellite connection. It gets them around 250Mb, it went in easily, and the monthly cost is reasonable compared with what they were getting before.

The part that actually mattered was latency rather than speed. Phone calls over the internet need the delay on the connection to stay below about 100 milliseconds, otherwise people start talking over each other and the call feels broken no matter how fast the line is. Older satellite broadband was hopeless at this, which is why it was never an answer for telephony. Starlink comfortably clears it, and that is what turned it from a broadband fix into a phones fix too.

Moving premises without losing your number

Another Luton client, a door showroom, moved premises recently and wanted to keep their phone numbers.

On an analogue line that is a job with an Openreach appointment attached, and often a new number if you have moved far enough. On a digital system the numbers are not tied to a building at all.

We got broadband into the new showroom ahead of the move. They unplugged the phones, carried them over, plugged them in, and were taking calls again immediately. No transfer date, no period of diverting to a mobile, no change of number on their signage and vans.

This is worth knowing before you sign a lease rather than after. It is one of the genuine advantages of the switchover, and it only works if the broadband at the new address is sorted out first.

Close enough to turn up

We are twenty minutes or less from Luton. Most problems are fixed remotely, because most problems can be, but when one cannot be we come out.

If you are not sure what your building can actually get, we will check it and tell you, including when the honest answer is that there is nothing worth changing yet.