Latest announcements and progress related to local broadband services.
For anyone who hasn’t seen the email notes that were sent around at the beginning of the month (or who has since forgotten!), there’s a public meeting in Balquhidder Village Hall tomorrow, March 18th, between 2-4pm.
This is an opportunity, ahead of our ‘public’ launch, to being yourself up to date with progress and to have any questions you might have answered, so feel free to come and ask us anything (about the broadband, that is).
We look forward to seeing you there!
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. Continue reading New Year, Still Digging
Here we go, and all that: our first speed test from the WiFi hotpoint that’s now been set up at the cabinet. Eleven years, Eleven years of blood, sweat and toil, enlivened by the occasional broadside at BT, the Scottish and British governments and their agencies. Now we’re just waiting for the splicer to turn up and splice the, ah, mainbrace and we’ll have the first houses connected: at the moment, fibres are dangling tantalisingly down the interior wall. Continue reading Not Quite Believing It Department…
After a longish stretch of fine, dry and bright weather, it was entirely predictable that the day for the blowing of the first fibre in our network would see the weather revert to type, dark and soggy was the order of the day – the Scots word “dreich” covers it beautifully. Continue reading Fibre: Reel to Real
I’m pleased to be able to say that the network build is now happening faster than we can keep the web site updated! Which is definitely a nice problem to have.
So, whilst we’ve had a couple of hiccups, the team’s enthusiasm including a spirited attempt to beat the land speed record for ploughing in the dark (the mole plough has now been welded back together), very good progress is being made and is accelerating, thanks to a committed and ever-expanding (it’s the bacon butties!) volunteer dig team: Continue reading North Side Works
It’s been a while since our last full update, mainly because we’ve been busy, ah, doing stuff. So here’s where we are:
Balquhidder Community Broadband CIC is looking for a Project Officer to help with the delivery by community volunteers of the local fibre broadband network in Balquhidder.
Having finally got the health, safety and insurance bureaucracy out of the way, we’ve been able to get properly stuck in with the network dig. Now, there are a couple of ways of going about this: from picking the smallest, least disturbing tools possible and proceeding in a sensitive and non-disruptive manner, to throwing the biggest damn digger you can find at the job, on the principle that it won’t find anything it can’t handle. So guess which we went with?
There’s clearly been (and remains) a bit of confusion about how we actually get our connection to the outside world, who provides it and where it actually goes. So the day when that fibre actually got installed to our cabinet seems like a good time to describe it.
In March 2017, following a second failed procurement run through Community Broadband Scotland, we formally withdrew from that public funding process and reverted to seeking de minimis (up to €200,000) public support for our project. This followed more than three years effort in engaging with CBS, and that after its taking two years to establish whether or not we would qualify for funding. So the decision was taken with the greatest reluctance, not least because doing so would create a significant shortfall in our project budget.
Now, a parallel community project, with similar goals to ourselves and itself with a great deal of expertise, North Skye Broadband, has also been forced to withdraw from the public funding process, issuing this press release, one that we could have issued practically unchanged to describe our own experience.
