New Year, Still Digging

What better way could there be to burn off the indolent excesses of Christmas and Hogmanay than head up the hill and help dig in the next leg of our network? Well, I can think of a few, but at least here we can go home with a warm glow of community participation, our innards warmed by Andrea’s excellent soup, even if our feet are freezing.

So a dozen or so of us turned out this morning and managed to take the 16mm backbone duct up as far as The Knoll, to feed all the properties at and en route to Ballinluig. We also got the chamber installed and all of the 7mm property drops laid – that’s well over a kilometre of ducting in, over rough terrain, on what turned about to be a very productive January day.

We now need to get across the road at Ballinluig, at the Village Hall and over Stronvar and Calair bridges, so that we can extend the network into its initial star, from which local teams can extend to serve all the houses in each of these sectors. The good news there is that we finally seem to have got consensus from our to-ing and fro-ing with the roads department of Stirling Council and, weather permitting, our contractor is hoping to start those crossings this week. (Stop Press: I’ve just seen the snow forecast, so please don’t hold your breath here).

So that was a really good turn out today, and we’re going to take advantage of every possible weather window to keep things moving. So woolly underwear and goose grease seem to be the prerequisites for working on the  winter rollout of fibre networks. You have been warned

2 thoughts on “New Year, Still Digging”

  1. Many congratulations on your announcement about going live.

    We are a group in North Norfolk trying to get a FTTH network underway. We are collaborating with an offshoot of B4RN in South Norfolk who have also this week achieved their first live 1Gb connections.

    Would be interested to learn how you managed to obtain financial support from Leader funding in Scotland. They won’t entertain us in England.

    1. It wasn’t easy: we discovered early on that LEADER doesn’t fund any capital element of a project, so we set up a fund match between them and Stirling Council for 50:50 joint funding of our project manager post. That was the easy bit – we then had to go through multiple iterations of our application before it was finally approved. We did however find that, because of their focus, LEADER funding (ERDF/SRDF) does not count towards de minimus expenditure, which was useful. Depending on your project structure (we’re constituted as a CIC – Community Interest Company), I don’t see why any LEADER area wouldn’t consider support for this type of project.

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