Who needs a ferret master when Fibre the Dog gets to work :)
More no-nonsense JFDI from CyberDoyle and friends.
More no-nonsense JFDI from CyberDoyle and friends.
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Monday, 14 March 2011
Northern Fells Broadband
Another packed public meeting last week, this time in Rosley, Cumbria with members of the local community attending to listen to the NextGenUs 4th utility approach.
A show of hands at the end of the meeting demonstrated that three-quarters of those present supported the NextGenUs offer and offers a firm mandate for the local communities and NextGenUs to work together to create a local exemplar network that will in turn help to inform and inspire other communities across Cumbria to want to step up and benefit too.
North Yorkshire FiWi - a Year On
NextGenUs is delighted to publish a guest blog post by Mr William Garrett, local broadband community champion for Newton upon Rawcliffe and Stape parishes in the North Yorkshire Moors, that tells the story of the pioneering NextGenUs FiWi project delivered in partnership with NYNet
My name is Billy Garrett and you could say that I am keen on technology interests such as amateur radio (call sign G1WRG) and the Internet., besides being a Trade Sales Manager at quietpc.com, a Parish Councillor and Lay Reader in the Church of England and a member of various other organisations.
So you could say I'm quite busy at times!!
Having spent most of my working life as an engineering training manager in Bradford, West Yorkshire, I became used over a number of years to using amateur radio and the Internet which had become indispensable.
Before we left Bradford to move to Newton upon Rawcliffe in North Yorkshire, in 2002, I had become accustomed to having superfast 1 Mb from Yorkshire Cable fibre to the Cabinet!!!
So when we moved in, the first job was to have ADSL enabled on the existing phone line.
BT said it was not possible as the telephone line was not good enough! So I said please install a new line that is good enough!
I think they regretted agreeing to that as it caused a lot of problems with having to dig up the road etc
However, after a lot of hard work by the dedicated engineers, to whom I'm eternally grateful, they finally achieved a 512kb/s connection for me which was upgraded to a 1Mb business connection sometime later.
Well it turned out that I was the only one in the village with broadband. So I set up a VISP (Virtual Internet Service Provider ) company called BeelineBroadband..net to enable me to put pressure on BT to have broadband installed in all of the homes in the village.
Unfortunately, due to the costs involved I was only able to achieve this for two homes. So in the end I was inundated with requests to share my own ADSL connection wirelessly using 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi in the village and in the surrounding district.
It was only half a megabyte to start with, but people were delighted to have it and really appreciated my efforts.
However, there were times when it ran very slow due to the amount of activity and demand so I approached NyNet with a view to obtaining a connection from. their newly installed fibre link in Pickering.
They agreed in principle to do this but costs would have been prohibitive and they kindly suggested that I contact Guy Jarvis and the NextGenUs team.
Guy had already been in touch with them with a view to installing a fibre to the home connection for rural areas in North Yorkshire.
In August 2009. the Parish Council and John Marsden, the Chief Exec of NYCC at the time had a key meeting and as a result NYCC provided £30k to assess feasibility of a super-fast broadband solution and to part contribute towards costs - a forerunner of Big Society in a way.
After much deliberation and discussion , the Parish Council asked NextGenUs UK CIC to manage the whole process of design, procurement, build, own, operate on the community's behalf a high-speed broadband service to replace my wireless service to my existing customers.
The next step was for us to explore the possibility of getting fibre to Newton along the North Yorks Moors Railway but were unable to proceed due to the high wayleave charges sought by NYMR
We also explored the possibility of using BT poles and ducts to bring the fibre from Pickering. This was making good progress with the BT team until BT top-level management decided that it didn't approve of our activities and imposed prohibitive costs and conditions which made it impossible to proceed.
The fact that BT had no intention of installing fibre or any kind of high-speed Internet in Newton upon Rawcliffe and Stape in the foreseeable future was neither here nor there.
So the second-best option was to install a temporary high-speed 5 MHz wireless service.
Due to the local topology, the service has to be relayed over 4 hops on a 16km journey across the Vale of Pickering before being sent North to the parishes of Newton & Stape in the North Yorks Moors, then distributed wirelessly across a sparsely populated area. involved, hills, dales and plenty of trees - ie very challenging terrain.
To give some idea of the scale, there are approximately 140 homes and farms and I was told that it takes a 42 mile round trip to deliver the parish magazine to each of those homes.
NextGenUs obtained several quotes for a hybrid fibre/wireless FiWi network design interconnecting with a NYNet-supplied internet fibre feed at Lady Lumley School Pickering.
These quotes ranged between £90k and £250k, so NextGenUs decided to match fund the funding available to the parish council so that the job could proceed.
The network itself was then built in the height of the 2009/2010 winter (ice station zebra!) and went live in February 2010 offering initially low cost symmetrical broadband of 5 Mbs and 10Mbps internet access to the local community. This is equivalent to the extremely expensive SDSL as supplied to the big cities such as London and Manchester etc.
NextGenUs, as a community interest company, seeks to maximise the value created for the local community at all times and employs me and my small company, Beeline Broadband to provide first line local support, with NextGenUs managing the administration, billing and overall technical delivery.
One day soon, we hope to supplement the wireless service with fibre to the home (FTTH).
Watch this space . :-)
Cllr Billy Garrett G1WRG
My name is Billy Garrett and you could say that I am keen on technology interests such as amateur radio (call sign G1WRG) and the Internet., besides being a Trade Sales Manager at quietpc.com, a Parish Councillor and Lay Reader in the Church of England and a member of various other organisations.
So you could say I'm quite busy at times!!
Having spent most of my working life as an engineering training manager in Bradford, West Yorkshire, I became used over a number of years to using amateur radio and the Internet which had become indispensable.
Before we left Bradford to move to Newton upon Rawcliffe in North Yorkshire, in 2002, I had become accustomed to having superfast 1 Mb from Yorkshire Cable fibre to the Cabinet!!!
So when we moved in, the first job was to have ADSL enabled on the existing phone line.
BT said it was not possible as the telephone line was not good enough! So I said please install a new line that is good enough!
I think they regretted agreeing to that as it caused a lot of problems with having to dig up the road etc
However, after a lot of hard work by the dedicated engineers, to whom I'm eternally grateful, they finally achieved a 512kb/s connection for me which was upgraded to a 1Mb business connection sometime later.
Well it turned out that I was the only one in the village with broadband. So I set up a VISP (Virtual Internet Service Provider ) company called BeelineBroadband..net to enable me to put pressure on BT to have broadband installed in all of the homes in the village.
Unfortunately, due to the costs involved I was only able to achieve this for two homes. So in the end I was inundated with requests to share my own ADSL connection wirelessly using 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi in the village and in the surrounding district.
It was only half a megabyte to start with, but people were delighted to have it and really appreciated my efforts.
However, there were times when it ran very slow due to the amount of activity and demand so I approached NyNet with a view to obtaining a connection from. their newly installed fibre link in Pickering.
They agreed in principle to do this but costs would have been prohibitive and they kindly suggested that I contact Guy Jarvis and the NextGenUs team.
Guy had already been in touch with them with a view to installing a fibre to the home connection for rural areas in North Yorkshire.
In August 2009. the Parish Council and John Marsden, the Chief Exec of NYCC at the time had a key meeting and as a result NYCC provided £30k to assess feasibility of a super-fast broadband solution and to part contribute towards costs - a forerunner of Big Society in a way.
After much deliberation and discussion , the Parish Council asked NextGenUs UK CIC to manage the whole process of design, procurement, build, own, operate on the community's behalf a high-speed broadband service to replace my wireless service to my existing customers.
The next step was for us to explore the possibility of getting fibre to Newton along the North Yorks Moors Railway but were unable to proceed due to the high wayleave charges sought by NYMR
We also explored the possibility of using BT poles and ducts to bring the fibre from Pickering. This was making good progress with the BT team until BT top-level management decided that it didn't approve of our activities and imposed prohibitive costs and conditions which made it impossible to proceed.
The fact that BT had no intention of installing fibre or any kind of high-speed Internet in Newton upon Rawcliffe and Stape in the foreseeable future was neither here nor there.
So the second-best option was to install a temporary high-speed 5 MHz wireless service.
Due to the local topology, the service has to be relayed over 4 hops on a 16km journey across the Vale of Pickering before being sent North to the parishes of Newton & Stape in the North Yorks Moors, then distributed wirelessly across a sparsely populated area. involved, hills, dales and plenty of trees - ie very challenging terrain.
To give some idea of the scale, there are approximately 140 homes and farms and I was told that it takes a 42 mile round trip to deliver the parish magazine to each of those homes.
NextGenUs obtained several quotes for a hybrid fibre/wireless FiWi network design interconnecting with a NYNet-supplied internet fibre feed at Lady Lumley School Pickering.
These quotes ranged between £90k and £250k, so NextGenUs decided to match fund the funding available to the parish council so that the job could proceed.
The network itself was then built in the height of the 2009/2010 winter (ice station zebra!) and went live in February 2010 offering initially low cost symmetrical broadband of 5 Mbs and 10Mbps internet access to the local community. This is equivalent to the extremely expensive SDSL as supplied to the big cities such as London and Manchester etc.
NextGenUs, as a community interest company, seeks to maximise the value created for the local community at all times and employs me and my small company, Beeline Broadband to provide first line local support, with NextGenUs managing the administration, billing and overall technical delivery.
One day soon, we hope to supplement the wireless service with fibre to the home (FTTH).
Watch this space . :-)
Cllr Billy Garrett G1WRG
Monday, 7 March 2011
Great Salkeld Broadband
At the end of the meeting of just over 50 people attending all bar one voted in favour of the NextGenUs solution as the best way forwards - another great and growing example of the "Together We Are The Network" philsophy in action!
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