Innovative ideas bring broadband to remote areas

A year ago, the news on rural broadband access was all about the problems. Now it is about solutions which might help cities too.

Public funds are making some difference but, on the whole, the turnaround is a tribute to small entrepreneurs, who saw opportunities in the gaps left by BT and the big cable networks.

Hull-born Guy Jarvis came back from Australia in 2001 and could not believe that Brits within shouting distance of towns had less broadband than some customers in the proper Outback. His company – previously Fibrestream, now morphing into NextGenUs – follows a business model, enabled in 2006, called a community interest company, which means it must re-invest most of its profits for public benefit. It has just launched a demonstration project giving the Humber Lifeboat station a full two-way connection, enabling it to stream film of operations to other agencies, such as coastguard and media, as well as downloading at top speed to "the remotest spot in England" – Spurn Point, at the end of the finger of sand which steers the Humber into the North Sea.

When we first reported the project, it looked as if the answer was to squeeze more out of existing wires from the BT exchange, at Easington. But that would not have been fast enough. Another possibility was to run new fibre-optic cable over the five miles – but the cable itself costs 10 a metre and the cost of digging and ducting can easily make that 110. A cheaper option was to wrap new cable around the old BT wires, strung on poles between Easington and Spurn Point. But BT's charging rules made even that too expensive.

Satellite connections are costly and cause signal delays which are awkward for some applications. The eventual solution, at about 6,000, was a superfast 1,000 megs-per-sec cable up a tower block in the heart of Hull, to a transmitter-receiver array exchanging radio signals of 100 mps capacity with Spurn Point, 22 miles away, over a series of relays. Actual initial test speeds were 40mps "down" and 20 mps "up" and they can be tweaked up. The lifeboat crew and another thousand customers in Hull and Holderness will get a similar service for about 20 a month for typical household needs, on a pay-by-use basis. A lot of city customers pay more for less.

Mr Jarvis says: "We call it fi-wi – a mixture of fibre-optics and wireless. And it is probably the future for thousands of communities. My advice to anyone feeling left out is: talk to your neighbours. On your own, you are not going to get anywhere."

Crabtree Hall, a business centre on a diversified farm near Northallerton, is in the course of exploring the same range of options which led to the Spurn Point solution. The owners, the Pybus family, put 60,000 into their internal networks, to get one of the first cerficates of excellence under a scheme called ict active, funded by Yorkshire Forward to promote a new set of British Standard specifications. Now they want external connections to match. The complex has a wireless connection to the BT exchange at Bedale, but with telecoms using half the capacity, broadband speeds are only about one meg per second. That is not bad for the location, but with five offices sharing, they could use more like 10 – to guarantee everyone the two mps they would effectively get in most city locations.

The man looking for the answer, Bob Cushing, a former BT man who set up Broadband Vantage Ltd, sums up: "To put in a fibre-optic connection to Bedale, BT quoted 55,000 for five km. And then there would be bandwidth to buy on top – say 1,000 a month for 10 megs uncontended.

"There may be cheaper ways of getting there. There is a company which specialises in laying cable along sewers, for example. Or we might be able to plug into an existing network. "But you can lay all the cable you like and it won't do you any good if you are going through an exchange which does not have enough capacity. So we are also looking at linking into to NYNET, a subsidiary of North Yorkshire Council which rents out access to the council's private fibre-optic network.

"The other option is to upgrade the wireless connection we have already got. One way or another, we will make it work."

Already getting better broadband than a lot of city customers are the B-road destinations of Newton-on-Rawcliffe and Stape, amounting to about 140 homes on the edge of the moors above Pickering. The hero here was William Garrett, who used to teach engineering students in Leeds and took his screwdrivers with him when he semi-retired.

He talked BT into fixing a very basic ADSL connection to his home and then set up wireless connections with neighbours who could not get the same. His son was setting up a computer components business (Quietpc.com) in the area, at Brawby Grange, and they tried a satellite connection, but gave up on it in exasperation and started exploring ways to get full terrestrial broadband. Having had a taste, the neighbours turned up to public meetings to ask for the same. In the course of getting knocked back, Mr Garrett was put in touch with Guy Jarvis and they started coming up with ideas. A plan to lay cable along the North York Moors Railway might have worked, but foundered because the railway sniffed a revenue opportunity and asked for too much rent. A line of BT "telegraph poles" might have been a suitable route but BT was awkward about access for maintenance.

At this point, the retiring chief executive of North Yorkshire Council, John Marsden, saw a chance to showcase how the council's NYNET services might be expanded. He fixed 25,000 of funding and Mr Jarvis's company put in a similar investment to set up a wireless relay, to Newton and on to Stape, from a NYNET connection at Lady Lumley School in Pickering, 14 miles away. About 50 customers pay up to 50 month for

up to 10 mps with low contention. On the basic service, they get an actual four to five mps for 20 a month plus VAT.

A lot still depends on Mr Garrett turning out with his toolkit to troubleshoot the wireless relay – which includes an aerial in the middle of nowhere, powered by batteries and solar panels. But the problems are being ironed out and Mr Garrett has become a local consultant for NextGenUs.

There might be some argument from Spurn Point, but Lyddington, Rutland, recently trumpeted the opening of "the UK's fastest rural broadband service". Villagers raised 37,000 for a private company called Rutland Telecom to lay a new cable from the nearest BT exchange, at Oakham, and pay for better "backhaul" from the exchange into the internet, to give up to 40 mps and an average of 25 mps at Lyddington.

One solution, good enough for a lot of home users, is to piggyback into the internet on a mobile phone signal, using a "dongle" which plugs into a computer.

Chris Marling, editor of the watchdog website Broadband Genie, says: "The trouble with mobile network coverage is the same as with fixed lines – it depends where you are. You can pick up a signal of some sort in most places.

"If you can't pick up a 3G signal, you'll be stuck with 2G (second generation) technology, which is ok for phone calls but incredibly slow for data traffic.

"The best speed you could theoretically get is 7.2 megabits a second and that would be stood under the perfect mast and being the only one using it. You would normally probably get only 1-2 megs, but that is good enough for simple web surfing and checking email."

Internet trailblazers

Crabtree Hall Business Centre, Little Holtby, DL7 9LN, or www.crabtreehall.com/ Phone 0845 450 5262. Bob

Cushing and Broadband Vantage Ltd, High Wycombe. Call 07776 302579, or [email protected]/ Guy Jarvis is [email protected], or call 01482 778554.

Chris Marling's website www.broadbandgenie.co.uk/ and ict active is at [email protected] or 0845 111 4122.

William Garrett is at 01751 477730 and broadband@billygarrett.

co.uk/

CW 19/6/10