A Norfolk pensioner, has angered neighbours by refusing Openreach access to the cabinet, to improve broadband speeds in the village.
Raymond Moreton of Yelverton, Norfolk has blocked access to Openreach engineers on a number of occasions, citing the box is on his land, as the reason. Mr Moreton says, “(Whenever they arrive) I go and stand in front of them and won’t let them work on it. I feel that they are invading my personal property.
“It’s six metres inside my property and I don’t want people trampling all over my garden several times a week.
“One day they came with seven vans and parked all down the road. They’ve even parked on my drive.
“The whole thing has caused my wife and I immense stress and I thought I was going to drop down dead at one point.”
It is understood that Mr Moreton and his wife bought the house in 1998, initially they were happy for BT to carry out works at the cabinet, allowing engineers the acces they needed, but in 2014 when broadband came to the Norfolk village, Openreach offered the husband and wife £758 to install a new cabinet on the land. Feeling this new cabinet would decrease the value of their home by £50,000 they refused.
BT seemed to accept this and built a new cabinet nearby in a lane, leaving the Moreton’s to believe the saga was over. In September of last year however, Mr Moreton found engineers digging a trench from the road to the box on his premises.
Since then he has not allowed access to the box, blocking them on numerous occasions. At times engineers were turning up multiple times in a week only to be refused access at every point.
Neighbours in the village are angered by the stubbornness of Mr and Mrs Moreton, and claim they are suffering with slow broadband speeds because of their selfish decision. One neighbour says, “He has got a bee in his bonnet and he won’t let them in”.
“I don’t understand what his beef is. As far as I understand it they just need to go into the box and change a few things over. If they’ve been parking on his lawn I could understand but as far as I can see it looks fine.”
Others are complaining that the education of their children is suffering as a result as the internet constantly disconnects while they are doing their homework.
The battle is ongoing, with a consultation between the Moreton’s and the Norfolk Highways Agency. A spokesperson for BT says, A BT Openreach spokesman said: “We understand that there is ongoing consultation between Mr Moreton and Norfolk Highways, and we will assess the situation once the public boundary has been clearly defined.”
“We do need to do some underground work in the area to enable more people to be able to get high speed broadband, so we need the public boundary clarified before we can do that.”
In the meantime, around 20 villagers are said to be affected by the Moreton’s refusal to allow engineers access to the cabinet and they are obviously unhappy, finding it difficult to understand the intentions and reasoning behind the decision.