(This is the second of the August crowd-sourced blog posts, by Chris Condor from Broadband 4 the Rural North project in England)
Here in the rural areas of the United Kingdom we have waited patiently for broadband to reach us. We have made do with expensive satellites and community WiFi for a decade. Many homes are still on dial up, with no mobile coverage in many places.
Now there is a government initiative to bring ’superfast’ broadband to everyone, but the funding is going to the incumbent who will deploy cabinets (Also Known As FTTC) which do not go to rural properties so this will not help us as we are still too far away from the cabinets to get a good connection. To solve this problem we decided a few years ago to look into the possibility of building our own Next Generation Access fibre network.
We found a lot of skills within our community and working together we made a business plan. We knew that in order to be sustainable we would need to be big enough to be able to lease a “dark fibre” to the nearest peering centre and we figured if we concentrated on areas of very poor or non-existent connectivity we would get high take-up. We decided to work from the ‘outside in’ because we knew rural demand is greater due to distance from services.
This plan worked, and we asked the people and businesses in eight rural parishes to invest in their own network, a community enterprise called B4RN The people invested enough to build the core and digging commenced at the end of March 2012. We are also raising funding by our ‘sponsor a metre’ project, people can donate £5 (€6) to have their name written on some ducting before it is ‘dug in’.
The community have started digging to the core to connect their houses and businesses. This week the equipment is being installed in the peering center in Manchester, the parish hub is powered up and the first connections are due to go live in the next couple of weeks. This is what is known as an ‘altnet’, an alternative to an incumbent telecom company who doesn’t find it economical to supply sparse population density. Using the ingenuity of a business or an active community, it is possible to build your own, build it once, build it right, and make sure it is sustainable.
B4RN has just won the internet hero award, so even our peers, the other ISPs recognise its success.
If we want a Digital Europe we will have to help and support many of these altnets and they will cover increasing tranches of the rural landscape, rejuvenating the villages that the digital revolution has left behind for the past decade.
An added bonus to the altnets is that as they creep closer to the urban fringes the difference in quality of service will be noticed and they will start to harvest
customers from suburbia, which will provide the incentive incumbent companies need to upgrade their service from copper to fibre. Market forces will deliver a win/win solution to the country. This is the best way to enable the people to help themselves and get a ‘futureproof’ solution for future generations.
If I had any power in Europe I would do everything I could to help the altnets. We need a level playing field, a tax break on Valuation Office Agency (Council) tax, an easy way to access soft loans which we can pay back over time as the network is built, and funding/support/ for start-ups.
I know we have Neelie’s support; now we need the support from everyone in Europe to build a network of fibre. Moral and Optic. Let’s get this continent rocking!
Email This Post
RSS comments feed on this entry
Chris,
You have the right idea, and B4RN are well on the way to demonstrating it.
Congratulations.
Here in rural Kent, in the south east of england, we think we will have to emulate you, as it seems funding from our Government will not enable our county council to partner with BT Openreach to bring fibre to the cabinet at all. While that is frankly a poor answer to our needs with not potential for future needs, it looked like it was going to be delivered.
Now it seems it is community gigabit fibre or nothing.
Keep up the great work.
Simon
Thanks Simon, you could form B4RK? There is a B4RS already formed and gearing up to start digging. (Broadband for the Rural South)
Its up to the people to help themselves, as I fear there is no help from anywhere else if you’re rural. We can do IT. Keep the faith.
You are 100 % right ! PM Cameron and the whole Government must be there to help.
Now it’s the EU Parliament the one that really must start acting . Since we need everyone with broadband also on smart phones and laptops-tablets, the question in front of all and the EU Parliament is : who will manufacture all this hardware ? the fiber and the routers , servers and switches ? base stations and the smart antennas ? the new cognitive radios ? who will ? Europa or Asia ? with 24 million unemployed in the EU, the question must be clear and that brings in another question : from now on , manufacturing in scale and low costs requires robots and robotic applications, is the EU going to continue to be the leader in robots ? or will Asia ? THERE IS GOING TO BE A HUGE JUMP ON ROBOTS FOR SCALE, whoever controls this industry will be able to provide 500 million smart phones and laptops with routers and solar -wind systems , etc., etc., to power them and cheap, who will do it ? Europa or Asia ? Smart Union and Action is needed right now, the Parliament better get going.
Rural areas are not creating jobs , so these broadband investments as well as on organic natural foods and farming are vital, and the banks who got ” Bail-Out money ” are still hoarding it, the money never went through to consumers, so we need action here right now, talk to PM Cameron too !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_x
Right John, and considering the potential for innovation when people are online with a fit for purpose connection its madness to allow public money to go to patching up old phone networks. We have to get the fibre out to everyone. Once we have connectivity that just works people will use it. They will then want to buy the gadgets that will make their lives easier. Manufacturing needs to up a gear and get going, but it won’t whilst connectivity is so patchy. People will remain analogue until digital is better. In many places it is too slow and frustrating to be digital.
John, I’m not aware of any issues producing network components, fibre, tablets, laptops etc., they seem to be readily available. Maybe you know otherwise.
I don’t follow your words about ‘robots’. Do you mean automated manufacturing? ps RaspberryPi now made in Wales!
Chris, you need to be clear about ‘patching up the old phone network’. All is new over recent years and just uses the copper local ends as a transmission method.
We live in a fairly remote area and have only recently been transfered to broadband, neverind fibre optic. It’s been extremely frustrating but this still seems the case with many rural area’s within the UK
Very true, trying to get online is very hard in some places, its no wonder folk give up. We have many around here who can’t get even dial up because their old lines are so noisy it won’t hold a connection. We also have people who have bitten the bullet and got a satellite, but these are so expensive to use if the kids get on them. A days data transfer can be used in a very short space of time, leaving them at the mercy of extra charges or very throttled speeds. Rural areas are notorious in the UK for poor connectivity and mobiles don’t work either. Interestingly enough quite a lot of people in urban areas have the same trouble, if you read the forums an awful lot of them are on sub megabit speeds too.
Even an award winning commercial operation in the Bristol metrolops can’t function effectively, even with business broadband –
Report to the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications
INQUIRY INTO SUPERFAST BROADBAND
“(Q) Will the Government’s targets (that the UK should have the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015) be met and are they ambitious enough? What speed of broadband do we need and what drives demand for superfast broadband?”
Aardman Animations – written evidence
“In my opinion we need to see faster download but more importantly we need to see upload speeds matching download speeds or it will not be of any use to people needing to work in the digital space …
As an example, a typical production size on completion is 624 Gigabytes (Shaun the Sheep as an example) with the best business broadband speeds this would take about 6 days to upload and over a day to download… assuming you see no service interruption.”