With most of the local cafés, pubs and restaurants now offering takeaway and/or delivery, here’s everyone’s menus and contact details. If you want to add any more, please send them via the Balquhidder WhatsApp group, send to info@nullbalquhidder.net or drop them in the comments section on this page. Continue reading Takeaway Menus
We are of course very pleased to be selected as a finalist for the 2020 Scottish Rural Awards, in the entirely unsurprising category of: Best Countryside Digital Innovator. This is further recognition, if any were needed, of the commitment and determination of our local community to bring our area to the global forefront of digital connectivity.
The awards are announced at the beginning of April 2020, so we’ll just have to live with the suspense until then.
Just as the rest of the world discovers 5G mobile networks (which is a whole other story), we finally have 4G coverage in the Balquhidder area. That is on the EE network, and via their new masts that were installed for the new Emergency Services Network (and don’t get us started on THAT).
So, if you’re thinking of moving to EE to take advantage of this, be aware that there are a few things to consider:
There’s no sign yet of Vodafone or O2 getting their act together on 4G for the local area yet, despite the latter putting in for planning consent several years ago. So if you need data coverage when you’re away from your broadband’s Wi-Fi and the coverage works for you, EE seems currently to be the only game in town.
We’re pleased (and gratified, no less) that Balquhidder Community Broadband’s founders, Richard Harris and David Johnston, have each been honoured with a Special Achievement Award in 2018’s Stirling Provost’s Civic Awards.
The presentation took place on 26 October, at a dinner in the historic surroundings of the Great Hall of Stirling Castle, where Kings, Queens and nobility have eaten, drunk, made merry and murdered each other for 800 years. This was a slightly more civilised affair, however, with the only notable casualties being the Haggis and Chickens who were on the night’s menu.
INCA – the Independent Networks Co-operative Association – is the body representing all independent, community and other alternative network (alt-net) operators in the UK.
At their 2018 Awards in London on 5th November, we’re very pleased to say that we took the award for Best Community Project. We regard that as recognition of the huge effort by the community, individuals and our ISP partners, Bogons, that have gone into the founding, planning, fund-raising, design and doing of our network. So all we’ve got to do now is get the ties off, get back out into the fields and keep digging – we’re not finished yet! And congratulations to all the other award winners for helping pull the UK into the twenty-first century, despite all the blockers put in the way by incumbent operators and egregious officialdom.
Balquhidder Community Broadband has been named as one of five examples of outstanding rural innovation in Scotland, after winning the Transport and Infrastructure category of the 2018 Scottish Rural Innovators Awards.
Held every two years, the awards are organised and hosted by Scottish Rural Action to highlight excellence in rural innovation in meeting the needs of rural communities. The winning projects will all be showcased at the Scottish Rural Parliament which is being held in Stranraer from 14-16 November.
Along with last week’s Stirling Provost’s Civic award, it’s good that we’re getting at degree of recognition outside the immediate industry for the dozen years of campaigning and hard work that have got us all to where we are now.
Here is Scottish Rural Action’s press release in full…
Continue reading BCB named as one of Scotland’s Top Rural Innovators
It’s astonishing what can be achieved when a community pulls together! (sorry…). With today’s goals being to lay 3km of 96- fibre-in-duct backbone from Dhanakosa to Monachyle Beag on the Northern Loop and to lay 800m of ducting to connect the Southern Loop from Tuarach to Monachyle Mhor, we put out the call. And our community responded: no less than thirty people turned out to form a human tugging and pulling chain over some seriously rough and muddy terrain. Continue reading The Big Pull
Once you’ve got yourself connected to our spiffy new fibre network, you’ll probably still have your landline phone number and the BT landline over which it’s delivered to your house. It doesn’t matter who you use to provide your phone service, it still comes in over that ancient BT copper wire, and of course you’re charged line rental and call charges for using it – most of us have been paying £25-30 a month for this.
The good news is that you don’t need to do this once you’re connected to the fibre: you can move your existing number into an online telephone service over our fibre connection, ditch your BT line altogether and thereafter only pay for the calls you make, with no line rental. Oh, and the sound quality will be much, much better.
The technology used is called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP for short. In many cases, you can also continue to use your existing telephones, with the aid of a small adapter.
So this is how to set up VoIP over BCB’s fibre (or indeed, anyone else’s) network.
Anyone remember the EU? Just the world’s most powerful trading and cultural bloc, and the entity that’s done more for Scottish rural regeneration than Westminster managed in centuries? Yes, that one. Anyway, given that we’ve had a useful amount of EU funding (via LEADER) for our project, they sent a film crew along to make a couple of documentaries about us, where we’ve got to and where we’re going in future. It’s now live on the EU’s YouTube channel and (small fanfare) here it is…
This is what happens when you’ve had your house ready to be connected for a couple of months but you’re still waiting for the splicers to turn up: poetry. This from our very patient local resident rhymer, Penny:
If only I could splice a fibre, I'd become a web subscriber, Reach out to the world at a guaranteed speed And from frustration forever be freed. E'en 4G could become cognoscible, But THAT, I think is a dream impossible ...
