Rural Broadband
Discussion
Here's a link to our company.
http://www.tovevalley.com/
I'm only a worker bee in the operation. Basically a bunch of old boys in Abthorpe organised a village wide network from a satellite link 10 years ago. Then 3 years ago they cottoned onto the Defra grant for broadband and started making inroads. We raised the cash to pay for the backhaul provider (originally 6 Degrees Data Limited) to run a fibre with 100Mbs connection to one of the villages and then took it from there. The easiest way to make it work was to get one of the primary schools to be the base for the fibre termination (they get free broadband obv) and then we beam it on from there (we'll be taking the aerials off the school so the kids can take the foil hats off). Each village has a band of voluntary helpers. There's 5 of us here in Wappenham. Between us we've been round 50 houses here and fixed up the aerials and the old boys have set up the relay aerials on the church roofs. Its worked well for the first year with everyone having plenty of bandwidth but by last november we would get down to ~5Mbs per household on a busy saturday night so when we connected out first inter village fibre in december (Weedon Lois to Wappenham) we upgraded to a 1Gbs backhaul (from Fibre Options Limited) and now I have 30-50Mbs.
We've had to apply for the Defra money in chunks as we haven't got enough capital to pay for all the fibre between villages in one go but we started that last September when the farmers were harvesting so the fields were empty) and we're just doing the last links to the outlying villages/houses. The system is very stable, I'll admit we've had a couple of very short outages but I was happy to cut off our BT phone and go to Vonage IP phones (£9/mnth with my old phone number for unlimited landline calls).
All the equipment we install is made by Ubiquiti who have been quite supportive. The wifi aerials (Nanostations) are capable of handling 100Mbs so we're certainly not champing at the bit to go FTTP although the intervillage fibre runs just down the back of my neighbours fence so it wont be hard to get to...
I'm off back into the garage now to tinker (whilst watching Sons of Anarchy on my new garage Smart TV).
http://www.tovevalley.com/
I'm only a worker bee in the operation. Basically a bunch of old boys in Abthorpe organised a village wide network from a satellite link 10 years ago. Then 3 years ago they cottoned onto the Defra grant for broadband and started making inroads. We raised the cash to pay for the backhaul provider (originally 6 Degrees Data Limited) to run a fibre with 100Mbs connection to one of the villages and then took it from there. The easiest way to make it work was to get one of the primary schools to be the base for the fibre termination (they get free broadband obv) and then we beam it on from there (we'll be taking the aerials off the school so the kids can take the foil hats off). Each village has a band of voluntary helpers. There's 5 of us here in Wappenham. Between us we've been round 50 houses here and fixed up the aerials and the old boys have set up the relay aerials on the church roofs. Its worked well for the first year with everyone having plenty of bandwidth but by last november we would get down to ~5Mbs per household on a busy saturday night so when we connected out first inter village fibre in december (Weedon Lois to Wappenham) we upgraded to a 1Gbs backhaul (from Fibre Options Limited) and now I have 30-50Mbs.
We've had to apply for the Defra money in chunks as we haven't got enough capital to pay for all the fibre between villages in one go but we started that last September when the farmers were harvesting so the fields were empty) and we're just doing the last links to the outlying villages/houses. The system is very stable, I'll admit we've had a couple of very short outages but I was happy to cut off our BT phone and go to Vonage IP phones (£9/mnth with my old phone number for unlimited landline calls).
All the equipment we install is made by Ubiquiti who have been quite supportive. The wifi aerials (Nanostations) are capable of handling 100Mbs so we're certainly not champing at the bit to go FTTP although the intervillage fibre runs just down the back of my neighbours fence so it wont be hard to get to...
I'm off back into the garage now to tinker (whilst watching Sons of Anarchy on my new garage Smart TV).
bit late to this thread!
in rural leicestershire here, some 3Km from the BT remote exchange, and still on ADSL MAX (up to 8m).
currently get 5.5m (profile speed) which is not too sad, the biggest PITA is upload speed is fixed at 374Kb/s.
talking to others in the village, some were only getting 0.5M, but mostly this was down to s
t house wiring, once sorted, using decent filtered master sockets etc, most get 4-6M.
as an area, we missed out on the upgrade to ADSL2, and were not scheduled for anything other than what we had, so we approached the county council about BDUK rural BB provision, but because of some pretty questionable antics by a company called gigaclear, the BDUK route was blocked for us, so we had to go to Openreach direct as a village and pay for the installation of FTTC in the village, this cost us some £15K (raised by the village putting their collective hand in their pockets), it get's installed in the next few weeks.
This should give us 'up to 76M' - and looking at the lengths here, most should get the 76M.
It's been an interesting journey, the politics have been quite an eye opener, (some very questionable stuff is going on in the background that really does nothing to help.)
theory goes, current Openreach FTTC is V17a profile, although they are currently looking to roll out G.Vector (http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/01/bt-extend-uk-vectoring-trials-fix-fttc-fibre-broadband-speeds.html)
There is also talk of them trialing Profile 30a, (200Mb vs. 17A at 100Mb) but it looks like they are going to skip this and go with the G.Fast in the future.
Anyway, be nice to get onto FTTC, just a shame we had to pay for it to be installed when there was supposed to be government money to pay for rural broadband.
in rural leicestershire here, some 3Km from the BT remote exchange, and still on ADSL MAX (up to 8m).
currently get 5.5m (profile speed) which is not too sad, the biggest PITA is upload speed is fixed at 374Kb/s.
talking to others in the village, some were only getting 0.5M, but mostly this was down to s
t house wiring, once sorted, using decent filtered master sockets etc, most get 4-6M.as an area, we missed out on the upgrade to ADSL2, and were not scheduled for anything other than what we had, so we approached the county council about BDUK rural BB provision, but because of some pretty questionable antics by a company called gigaclear, the BDUK route was blocked for us, so we had to go to Openreach direct as a village and pay for the installation of FTTC in the village, this cost us some £15K (raised by the village putting their collective hand in their pockets), it get's installed in the next few weeks.
This should give us 'up to 76M' - and looking at the lengths here, most should get the 76M.
It's been an interesting journey, the politics have been quite an eye opener, (some very questionable stuff is going on in the background that really does nothing to help.)
theory goes, current Openreach FTTC is V17a profile, although they are currently looking to roll out G.Vector (http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/01/bt-extend-uk-vectoring-trials-fix-fttc-fibre-broadband-speeds.html)
There is also talk of them trialing Profile 30a, (200Mb vs. 17A at 100Mb) but it looks like they are going to skip this and go with the G.Fast in the future.
Anyway, be nice to get onto FTTC, just a shame we had to pay for it to be installed when there was supposed to be government money to pay for rural broadband.
Cheib said:
At least it seems to have 4G coverage!
Not very rural then 
BT offer around 0.2-0.5mbps here, assuming it's actually working, which more often than not it isn't. As a village we campaigned hard a few years ago and now have point to point microwave links so 30 down 15 up which is a massive relief, due to be upgraded to 50/20 later this year. Amusingly BT are now doing their county-wide roll out of their new shiny broadband services.... and have no plans whatsoever (and never did) to reach our village or others like it.
No 3G though, let alone 4G!
Planning on moving out of London this year. Been here for all my 52 years, so have been perusing Rightmove for a while now. They have a broadband checker on their site but the joke is, no matter where you look, even places that I know have no high speed net or phone signal, it always says 76 mbps.
Useless.
Useless.
Scuffers said:
Put my phone number into that and I get - [b]Exchange name:
Status: Accepting orders
Good news. Your serving cabinet is enabled for fibre broadband. Please note, in a minority of instances that doesn't guarantee your availability. Contact your preferred communications provider for your home or business to order.[/b]
I'll be in that minority of instances, then... as I've been told for sure fibre won't be coming to my village any time soon.
CheesyFootballs said:
I'd have to drive to it - about 2.5 miles away.
Think I'll give Plusnet a call and see what's happening now.
?.Think I'll give Plusnet a call and see what's happening now.
If the cabs that far away then no, your not going to get fttc to work (ie. Faster than adsl2).
You need to be local to it, like less than 1 mile max (by cable).
Scuffers said:
?.
If the cabs that far away then no, your not going to get fttc to work (ie. Faster than adsl2).
You need to be local to it, like less than 1 mile max (by cable).
What, never ever going to get fttc?If the cabs that far away then no, your not going to get fttc to work (ie. Faster than adsl2).
You need to be local to it, like less than 1 mile max (by cable).
So was this 'super fast broadband to everyone' ever going to work?
Or we're the govmnt telling fibs?
CheesyFootballs said:
What, never ever going to get fttc?
So was this 'super fast broadband to everyone' ever going to work?
Or we're the govmnt telling fibs?
It isn't. While some is real, other is simply a form filling exercise. Install fibre, tick the box for another village enabled, even if there aren't enough cabinets to actually supply the product. Case in point, we went live at Christmas but half the village is estimated to get lower than ADSL speeds, including us So was this 'super fast broadband to everyone' ever going to work?
Or we're the govmnt telling fibs?
And we're hardly rural being 6 miles from a major town and 20 from the M25. No 3G here either!FTTC speed vs Cabinet Distance
http://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/2013/chart...
For checking what you should be able to get / or when looking to move house (use streetview to find local shops and try their number in the checker if you do not have anything else)
https://www.btwholesale.com/pages/static/Community...
http://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/2013/chart...
For checking what you should be able to get / or when looking to move house (use streetview to find local shops and try their number in the checker if you do not have anything else)
https://www.btwholesale.com/pages/static/Community...
CheesyFootballs said:
Scuffers said:
?.
If the cabs that far away then no, your not going to get fttc to work (ie. Faster than adsl2).
You need to be local to it, like less than 1 mile max (by cable).
What, never ever going to get fttc?If the cabs that far away then no, your not going to get fttc to work (ie. Faster than adsl2).
You need to be local to it, like less than 1 mile max (by cable).
So was this 'super fast broadband to everyone' ever going to work?
Or we're the govmnt telling fibs?
Not sure what your getting at?
For superfast to work, your talking about v.fast, the next spec on from adsl2.
Adsl2 will work up to 4-5 miles (tops), and at best will make ~20mbps
In theory, fttc cabs support adsl2 as well as v.fast
As to being available to everybody, that's political statements for you, but bear in mind what their definition of superfast bb is.
I remember hearing that all rural areas would get quality, fast broadband, but if what you say is correct (and I have no reason to disbelieve you whatsoever) then in reality it isn't going to happen.
But let's face it, it's not the end of the world..
So the only way to get fast b&b would be to install more cabinets nearer to villages?
But let's face it, it's not the end of the world..
So the only way to get fast b&b would be to install more cabinets nearer to villages?
Edited by CheesyFootballs on Sunday 1st February 19:55
Anybody ever tried the Deltenna WiBE router? http://www.ruralbroadband.co.uk/3g-wibe/wibe-hs21-...
Apparently improves 3G reception and even obtains usable signal when none picked up by your phone. Been looking into this or Tooway satellite broadband.
Apparently improves 3G reception and even obtains usable signal when none picked up by your phone. Been looking into this or Tooway satellite broadband.
CheesyFootballs said:
I remember hearing that all rural areas would get quality, fast broadband, but if what you say is correct (and I have no reason to disbelieve you whatsoever) then in reality it isn't going to happen.
It's never been "all" rural areas. 90% of the population... with the final 10% getting 2mbps or better. Some counties are aiming for 95% but its unlikely in the properly rural areas.Gassing Station | Homes, Gardens and DIY | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff