Your universal right to broadband, even in rural areas

The press release says you can request 10Mbps, it doesn’t say you will get it.
So if you are currently in the 5% group with totally inadequate internet speeds, I expect you will be staying there.

I would be willing to pay for a faster connection but it is not a possibility. Yes, we are in a rural area but not that rural, and only a matter of three miles from an area with superfast Broadband. Our maximum available speed with any provider is 0.6KBPS with upload speeds of maximum 0.2. The connection drops out frequently and we have had days of BT engineers’ time to no lasting effect. We cannot stream anything and a smart TV is an irrelevance. A sound connection with 10MBPS seems more of a fantasy than achievable reality for us, but I would settle for half that speed at the moment. We have no gas and we have no reliable mobile signal or regular bus service either, but these are manageable compromises in return for rural living, but the lack of decent Broadband is becoming more and more of a handicap as everyone else gets faster and faster service. Yes, maybe town dwellers will be subsidising rural communities in future, but we have been paying the same as them for years for a comparatively very poor service which has had no new investment at all, as we use the old copper telephone cables for our Broadband.

This weekend’s issue of our local newspaper, the Bridgnorth Journal, has an interesting PERSONAL pledge from our Dave to the people of Shropshire: “We will connect you all to super fast broadband”. He announced “a commitment to connect the entire county by the end of his term in power in 2020”. A comfortable 4 ½ years to waffle on in the hope that the “pledge” will be forgotten… as it has been done before. We were promised “super fast broadband” across Shropshire in the early days of the Coalition but only 40,000 connections have been achieved so far and “it is hoped to connect another 20,000 soon”. I am one of the ‘connected’, and my current Which? broadband speed test shows Download at 36.92 Mb/s and Upload at 9.6 Mb/s which should be pretty good… but browser still blocks all too regularly for a number of minutes at a time. If that is what we have to accept for the joy of “super fast”, I don’t see the increased benefit. Still, as our Dave concludes that he plans a “universal service obligation” for broadband, as with water and electricity, then that’s OK then. If that is not actually achieved by 2020, then I expect our Dave, having dumped the stress of playing at PM, to roll up his sleeves and come here to fulfil his pledge, connecting the isolated farms and other properties that one finds, so inconveniently for BT, in rural areas. Can anyone lend him a spade?

SFBB Essential? It is to me. Everyone I know who doesn’t have it (me included) are living like second class citizens. For me its not a question of not being prepared to pay the going rate (eg £30-£60/month) its that its simply not technically possible to buy the service so we pay just as much for a hopeless service (1.2Mbps). The problem with basic infrastructure is that its not good business economics to install a universal service. If you use nationalised providers the tax payer fronts the cost and everyone pays even if they don’t want it. If you used private companies, the customer pays for it, but uneconomic customers cant get it (ie where the UK is now). So since we don’t want to renationalise, but we do want universal infrastructure, why don’t we just empower Ofgem (or whoever) to raise a levy on all the participating firms as a percentage of turnover or profit or capital base or whatever will be a fair reflection of their relative take and is the hardest number to minimise. Ofgem then award contracts back to provide the infrastructure to everyone. It becomes a cost of the business and everyone who benefits from the service (no matter where they live) contributes equally to it though their charges. I’m sure this is deeply flawed but its the best idea I’ve come up with other than winning the Euromillions and buying my own new infrastructure.

Here on the Isle of Mull, Scotland, BT have been subsidised to exend fibre beyond what they deemed ‘commercially viable’. This has happened in other areas too, of course. Those areas on Mull and some other islands still not covered are going to get wireless broadband. A contract has been signed and we hope to be connected by late summer of next year. Speeds of 50Mb/s will be offered, but most people seem likely to settle for less

The capital cost has been funded by ‘state aid’ (i.e. the UK tax-payer), but the service is to be run at commercial rates, with packages priced according to speed. The prices are only a little higher than BT’s normal rates (ignoring BT’s very low introductory offers) and since reliable wireless broadband will allow us to give up the land line, may actually work out cheaper.

The process has been driven by a local community company, though of course with help from statutory bodies. I suggest this would be a practical model for other remote areas in UK.

Norfolk, being widely recognised as the vibrant, energetic and thrusting county that it is, has found that it also has a need for better rural broadband and it has teamed up with an unlikely provider. The Church of England’s Diocese of Norwich is involved in a scheme which uses the spires and towers of churches all across the county to transmit data to remote villages. Fixed wireless points on churches beam the signals to other church spires and towers in order to create a network and users have a receiver on top of their property to bring the signal from their nearest church to their building. The Diocese and the regional newspaper group are the main shareholders in the company. The transmitters typically cover an area of 5 km radius but that can be increased up to 10 km. However, at present the average speed is only 8 Mbps so it’s no better than the standard speed – but it’s a lot better than the low or non-existent speeds in many remote pockets of the countryside. With nearly nine hundred churches in Norfolk [not all CofE] there is no shortage of village-based locations for this service. I dare say the blessed broadband is on the blink as often as with other networks but it has filled a few gaps in coverage and helped a number of farmers and businesses to operate and compete effectively.