A Spot of Digging

Problem = More Height Required to Reach Remote Rural Community

Solution = Put an Old Power Pole to Good Reuse

Deeply Rural Symmetric Fi:Wi Broadband

Newton and Stape (NANDS) are two adjoining parishes in deeply rural North Yorkshire where conventional broadband is patchy at best and non-existent for the majority of the 140+ homes and businesses present.

The NextGenUs NANDS project is the first of its kind in North Yorkshire and it is hoped that NANDS can be replicated to enable other local rural communities in the county of North Yorkshire and nationally to likewise benefit from super-fast symmetric connectivity.

NextGenUs UK CIC, in partnership with NYCC, NYNet, the Parish Council and local community ISP Beeline Broadband, has designed and deployed a Next Generation Notspot elimination network that reaches beyond merely meeting the Digital Britain 2Mbps USC to enable the local community to leapfrog to speeds of up to 10Mbps symmetric today and offers the future-proof capacity to move to 100Mbps symmetric and beyond as demand grows.

The project is an innovative example of how public, private and community sectors can come together and provide an answer to connectivity Notspots, a solution that provides the local community with the crucial CIC assurance that they are not simply swapping one monopoly service provider for another and instead are gaining a service that puts people first over commercial profits.

The NextGenUs network takes a symmetric fibre-optic direct internet access feed from a school and takes that connection on a twenty plus kilometer journey to reach into the local community, from where service is locally distributed using advanced wireless technology capable of supporting true world-class performance.

This particular methodology we call FiWi (Fibre and Wireless), a technique that offers a rapid route and least cost means to provide service where it is required now.

The local community has the ongoing assurance that NextGenUs UK CIC is bound by regulation to reinvest the surplus generated from operating the network and will do so by deploying FttH (Fibre to the Home) connections to local residents and businesses over the course of 2010, enabing the network to continue to offer world-leading capacity and flexibility for decades to come.