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.
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
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.
Images from planning, preparation and the first dig at Stronvar…
…or it is when the first segment of the network has to run along an unmade track. But here’s the first demonstration that we’re finally turning years of effort and planning into reality: this, today, is the very first section of dig for the first network segment.
It’s slightly ahead of the rest of the project – our local property developer needed to surface the track to his plots so has kindly offered to dig in the ducting for us, to save us (and him) from having to dig up his newly surfaced road again in a few weeks’ time.
But this is going to serve the first segment of network from the access point to the fibre backhaul at Stronvar, from where the network will be radiating out to the rest of the glen, just as soon as we can get ourselves and suppliers organised – that’s an ongoing job.
We’ve also got the final network design review happening next week, after which we should have everything nailed down, routes and equipment chosen. Then we’ll really be ready to get going.
Amid all the frustrations of trying to follow a public funding process that is clearly being made up by the relevant bodies as they go along, we’ve actually been able to get on with some real work towards the project. We’ve got a model that demonstrates the build cost (we can deliver a 1000+ MB/s network for less than the government’s per premise ‘value’ figure of £3,400 for a 10Mb/s service) and another that shows that the service is sustainable and financially viable. So far, so good.
In a world where uncertainty and idiocy seem to be the new normal, we know we can rely on one thing: the slow-moving nature of British (and Scottish) bureaucracy. We are though, however belatedly, now in the 30-day State Aid Public Consultation window during which commercial operators can rock up and say if they’re planning to do anything in the area. Given that our repeated representations to BT over the years have come to naught and that other commercial operators have refused to consider us – not least for fear of BT deliberately running a ‘spoiler’ project – it seems fairly unlikely that anything will interrupt progress. Continue reading July News
Things may have been a little quiet publicly on the broadband front, but that simply means that, like the swans on the loch, we’ve been paddling furiously beneath the surface, trying to make headway against rising currents. Those currents have been in the form of some hair-rending bureaucracy that’s been belatedly thrown at us by government bodies and which are currently causing us months of delay. So let’s first rewind to this time last year, when we entered into the procurement process required by Community Broadband Scotland for public funding. We followed their process and went out to market to solicit bids for a future-proof broadband service that could be provided at a market-competitive rate. What we got back were a few bids that were mostly poorly prepared, didn’t meet local needs and which offered equipment that would need replacing every few years. Uncool. Continue reading Project Update: June 2016
We’ve had the cabling company that works with Bogons, our preferred supplier, out to look at the glen and they’ve now been commissioned to come back and carry out the necessary detailed survey (taking 4/5 days) to fully cost what’s needed. That’s happening from 8 March. We’ve asked them to provide us with a menu of costs for each part of the network: the 13km that gets to all bar 22 of the 178 properties in our area and for each segment beyond that (totalling another 13km). This will let us work out just how much of the work we need to do ourselves to get to all parts of the glen: we know that the only way we will be able to provide fibre to every house or business in the area will through significant community effort as part of the lay.
The rest of our costs are now fairly firm, so we’re awaiting the survey results that will let us know just where we stand. We’re including in that survey the costs of crossing both the glen road where needed and the A84 where we’re serving Balquhidder Station.
