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
Tag Archives: community
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. Continue reading New Year, Still Digging
B4RN Storming
As many will know by know, the pioneer project in self-assembly broadband isn’t Swedish, but from Lancashire, where the staff and volunteers of B4RN have now rolled out true fibre broadband, so far to 2600 properties, with the number growing by the day. Their service is truly future-proof, delivering 1Gb/s now, rising soon to 5Gb/s for those who want it. To put that into perspective, that’s 3x as fast on download and 17x as fast on upload as BT’s fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) service, even in the few areas where that is available. And it’s 12.5x as fast on download as BT’s so-called “Superfast Fibre” (which it isn’t). And, when there’s a demand for even more performance, all B4RN has to do is turn up the wick, not dig up the ground.
Project Update: June 2016
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