Profile. CBN’s Adrian Wooster urges local communities to get organised or miss out on fibre

Adrian Wooster has a simple message for the those stuck in ‘not-spots’; get organised and don’t expect the government or BT to go out of their way to bring fibre to your community.

As Chief Technology Officer for the Community Broadband Network (CBN) he helps communities and, more usually, local councils to plan how to bring fibre to their part of the world without having to wait for BT to roll it out for them.

Wooster has worked for large telecommunications and IT companies, including Novell and (mainframe maker)Amdahl before joining CBN five years ago and so he knows that it is often more difficult for huge companies to make a business case for small infrastructure projects. He spent the ‘90s splitting his time between large projects across Europe and Silicon Valley from his home in Ireland before deciding to spend more time with his family through a move to Oxfordshire. From inside the CBN he has seen how ‘top down’ approaches can only go so far and that to get local fibre projects going, the best solution is local people gathering local support.

Action needed

While he largely welcomes the commitment to a 2Mb universal service obligation for 2012, ushered in by the Digital Britain report, he thinks that people who were expecting more of a commitment to funding a national roll out of fibre may have had their hopes pinned too high.

“Your attitude to fibre depends largely on your political beliefs,” he says. “People on the left think it should the government should fund a fibre network as a national asset and those on the right think it should always be paid for by the private sector. We’re always going to have governments in between those two views so you’ve got to accept that if there isn’t a business case to bring fibre to your area then it’s not going to come unless you do something yourselves and get organised.”

Wooster also believes that critics who point out the 50p telephone line will not raise sufficient money to make a dent in the bill to provide fibre to the ‘final third’ are missing the point.

“The tax isn’t coming in until next year and it will probably raise the best part of a billion pounds by 2016,” he says.

“That might not sound a lot when you think that the price of BT bringing fibre to the nation is put at around £30bn. However, that’s still a lot of money and what you need to realise is that if you get organised, you can get the community to part fund a project and you may then get some funding from this new pool of money and if you can make a business case through enough local support, you can get a network builder put in fibre.

“Where there is little or no business case for BT to roll out fibre it will only be rolled out by local people providing half a business case, and funding, and a network builder providing the other half. You can only get that if you raise funding, perhaps by getting a large proportion of local people to take the service for, say, two years to prove to a network builder it’s a worthwhile project.”

Cheaper deals

For those who believe that getting fibre is too much of a chore and the sums involved are beyond a community’s reach, Wooster has reassuring advice. As soon as you actually look in to the figures, there are massive savings that local people with local support can secure.

“The figures BT works to when it says it will cost £30bn to give fibre to the country rely on quotes for road works to lay cables at £125 per metre whereas we have been able to put people in touch with contracts who work to £4.50 per metre,” he points out.

“We also worked helped design the fibre network for the Cybermoor project in Alston in Cumbria which is England’s most sparsely populated area. A BT network would’ve cost £23,000 per home, because they rely on a major exchange everyone feeds off. We were able to design to the specifics of the village’s layout and got the cost down to £2,900 per home. So if you’re prepared to contact contractors and get quotes in and you get professionals to build a network to your requirements you can slash the cost BT thinks it will cost to give you fibre. If you’re a local group you’ve got the advantage that landowners will probably want to work with you and help out for no charge. If you’re BT wanting to put fibre under their land, the first thing they’ll do is calculate how much they can get away with charging you.”

INCA launching

The main preconception that people need to overcome, Wooster assures, is that BT is the only provider. Once groups start to understand there are many providers, many of which work with the top networks, discussions can begin and quotes obtained.

In fact, groups may often find they are nearer to fibre than they realise and that fibre may not be supplied by BT, so it pays to find out if an alternative network is nearby to hook in to. The Alston project in Cumbria, for example, feeds off a fibre network from Lancaster University which is part of a local scheme in Lancashire and Cumbria to connect schools and educational institutions.

This process of discovering companies which can help a community research, plan, finance and build a fibre network will become a lot simpler over the coming months with the launch of a new group, the Independent Network Cooperation Association (www.inca.coop). It is currently being headed by CBN but is expected to soon run as a distinct organisation through which local campaigners will be able to get advice from other people who have put fibre in to their areas as well as get in contact with the companies that could potentially help bring next generation access to their area.

Tags: Adrian Wooster, broadband campaigners, Broadband Fibre, CBN, community action, INCA