Rural community digging trenches in fight for next-gen broadband — UPDATED

By Dave Thomson
Published: November 23rd, 2009

The people of a remote village that they describe as “England’s last wilderness” have started digging the trenches that’ll grant them Next Generation Access (NGA) to broadband, meaning it’ll be far from also being the country’s last NGA not-spot. Alston Moor in Cumbria, where Britain’s first broadband co-operative was founded, is going DIY once again to avoid waiting for a state or commercial solution. Meanwhile, according to research from The Sunday Times, broadband is increasingly becoming a deal-breaker when it comes to selling homes in rural areas.

Alston Moor, based around the town of Alston, is in the North Pennines – and probably not the type of place you’d think about moving to if you were seeking the fast lane on the good ol’ information superhighway. And once upon a time – or, more specifically, seven years ago – you’d have been right; BT had declared it to be an area where broadband was “unviable.” After that, a community development worker called Daniel Heery decided to take matters into his own hands, drawing on Government funding in founding what’d be known as Cybermoor.

While Cybermoor’s first success was in outfitting Alston with 0.2Mbit/s Internet, it now has 100Mbit/s in its sights. In the early days, the transmitters that relayed their broadband signal were fixed onto chimneys. “We hooked into the school’s broadband supply via microwave and we had children teaching their grannies how to use it,” Heery told The Sunday Times. “It cost about £350 per household for the equipment and £65 for the connection.” Their new approach, however, is more akin to Wombles: underground, overground. With trenches being dug to accommodate fibre optic cabling, a microwave link to Telewest’s network in Newcastle will handle the backhaul. Instead of a cost of around £50,000 a year for an ISP to hook the village up, the cost of the mast and link are estimated to be around £100,000.

In shelling out for faster broadband – with speeds initially being expected to be around 20Mbit/s as the Cybermoor co-operative waits for the cost of 100Mbit/s backhaul services to fall – the people of Alston could be adding to their house prices. Even back in 2005, which was when BT eventually got round to hooking the village up to its network, properties that remained unconnected were a hard sell. “One remote farmhouse had been up for sale, but everybody who viewed it wanted broadband,” Heery continues. “It cost the owner £2,000 for us to make the connection, and the house was sold.” According to one estate agent, prices have risen by between twenty and twenty-five per cent since broadband came to town and “it’s still having a huge impact.” “Just last month we let a property to a lady who works from home and needs broadband,” says Jeremy Higgs, who owns the Pennie Way firm. “She wouldn’t be here without it.”

Anecdotal evidence put forward by The Sunday Times suggests broadband access is now one of the key selling-points homes in rural areas across the UK – and it seems to be a case of the faster the better. In Sevenoaks, Beverly Francis who works for estate agent Strutt & Parker, cites a time “when the buyer found out the internet speed was 4Mbit/s — fine for most people — he withdrew [his] offer; he wanted 8Mbit/s.” Meanwhile, in southwest Wales, Bob Humphrey, regional director of Stacks Property Search says, “some of our clients won’t consider properties unless broadband is available … it’s a normal part of most people’s lives these days, and to move to somewhere that does not have that facility is a serious deal-breaker.”

The Government wants ninety per cent of the UK to have NGA by 2017, there’s still no word on the remote areas that make up the other ten per cent. In fact, with its Universal Service Commitment (USC) target – omitted from the Digital Economy Bill last week – only to ensure that “virtually every household in the UK can get access to a line capable of delivering at least 2Mbit/s” by 2012, some homes may remain isolated from NGA indefinitely. (BT’s East of England director Peter McCarthy-Ward says it could take up to five years just to get all of Norfolk up to USC speed – and that’s if they’re “imaginative in how [they] seek funding.”) Community action, in the mould of Cybermoor, may still be the only way to get some places off the not-spot map.

UPDATE: But we don’t want to create the impression that the DIY route is an altogether straightforward solution. Erecting your own masts – and twenty-five metre high ones at that – is after all “quite a lot of work,” as Cybermoor team leader Kevin Wood told Samknows reporter Pauline Rigby. And going to such extremes isn’t about luxury: at the moment Cybermoor’s three hundred and sixty users are sharing 5Mbit/s of backhaul on their wireless network. “We’ve got a very clever bandwidth management package that keeps most users happy,” he continues, “But we’ve decided that if we’re going to put new kit in – we can’t carry on like this.”

Those living in the East of England, including Norfolk – but also Suffolk, Cambridge, Essex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire – could now potentially have an easier solution. They can now register their interest for NGA broadband under EREBUS: the Eastern REgion Broadband Uplift Scheme. According its website (available here):-

The purpose of this resource is to demonstrate that there is sufficient demand to make commercial investment in next generation broadband worthwhile. Nothing does this like listing real world (potential) customers (domestic, business and public sector) and the services which they require. The project will establish a database that will map demand down to post code level.