Connect8

Ian Beecher-Jones of Russell’s Water moved from BT to Village Networks recently, he totted up the costs and savings and wrote some questions and answers.  Ian is also happy to chat about the experience, drop him a line on:

ian@beecherjones.com

Previous set up

2 BT lines, 1 with Broadband and BT sport

Both lines have international call packages and Unlimited call, call minder and caller display.

With Village Networks

Both BT lines have gone and replaced with 1 Vonage connection running over Village Networks broadband, with the old BT number being transferred.  Vonage is £20/month  includes all UK landline and mobile calls. The international package cost £3.99/month and is unlimited.

For voice and video calls also we have a choice of Whats App, Facebook or Skype which all work over the broadband.

We use the Three mobile network and our mobile phones use Three Wi-Fi calling (which uses the wifi and broadband to make the call when you can’t get a phone signal), so now with full coverage of proper wifi our phones can be used all over the house.

Q & A

Do I have to keep my BT landline?

You can for landline calls, but you can use other services such as Vonage, Facebook, Whats App or Skype to make calls. How many land line calls do you make now rather than mobile calls?

Can I use my mobile now?

Yes, if your mobile provider has a service such as Wi-Fi calling or add on boxes (such as Vodafone Suresignal or ee SignalBox) then mobile calls will travel across the fast broadband and give you a signal.

Do I get BT sport with Village Networks?

No, BT sport will have to purchase separately in the same way you subscribe now, this £22.99 per month. Or if you are an EE customer with a data package for £5/month

How do I watch sport on my TV?

You can subscribe to BT Sport separately (£22.99) or Sky Sports to watch sport on a monthly basis. Or NowTV which is an on-demand Sky TV service for films and sports from Sky.

Can I use Netflix and Apple TV?

Yes, with the Village Networks service all these service work seamlessly.

Facts and Figures – Ian Beecher-Jones – cal

Ian has also broken down the expenditure, showing a substantial saving of £120 a month.

  For some tiny communities a new Green Cabinet (at about £30,000) isn’t the answer, it’s too expensive per house.  This is the case for some of Stonor, Pishill and we expect a few other local communities.  BDUK/OCC instead subsidise Openreach to provide Fibre To The Premises ‘FTTP’. They lay a fibre right up to the boundary of your property. OCC subsidies Openreach to do this in the background up to about £1700 per property – if there is less than say 15 homes to serve FTTP is cheaper.  The fibre delivers the broadband, not the copper.  Fibre is great but does have some drawbacks and can be a bit of a pain to install.  In summary its strengths  and weaknesses are:
Strengths of FTTP

Higher speeds than copper over any distance – the distance to the cabinet thing no longer matters

More reliable than copper, once it’s installed – with the slight caveat that overhead lines can still be damaged by trees/wind

Once a fibre is fitted, if you go with BT as the ISP you have the choice of BT’s standard Infinity packages from 30-80Mb/s. If you are prepared to pay a lot more, then over 100Mb/s is attainable but the packages for this are complex and hard to find.

Weaknesses of FTTP

Installation can be a hassle (slow, two visits at least – one survey, one fitting to house wall, sometimes a third to drill through and install kit inside house).  Seasoned broadband campaigners elsewhere in the country have warned me to be wary of the installs until Openreach improves its system.  FTTP is only just getting underway in Oxfordshire and we understand there were issues with the roll out in Rotherfield Greys.

If you have a regular drive/distance from road and are happy with a new over head cable with the fibre in being strung from the pole then connection should be free or a nominal £100. If you have an unusually long drive there can be excess costs that you have to pay – these can be from hundreds of pounds to thousands. If you want your drive dug up and relaid immaculately then that is usually extra.

Less choice of ISP – for early adopters it’s BT or the highway, later, Zen and A&A might come in (see below) but no Sky or Talk Talk. So if you have a Sky or Talk Talk etc package you need to get out of that.  ISPs don’t always offer an FTTP service once an exchange has been enabled, as it is a new and minority service.

General uncertainty around aspects of pricing – sometimes there is an activation fee of £100, you may have a switching fee of £100, sometimes this might all be waived by BT Openreach or the ISP. If you want to remove your copper line then there is a fee for that, usually.

As FTTP involves much more digging etc than using copper phone lines my judgement is that forecast FTTP availability dates will slip more than for cabinets.

Advice varies on whether you can get rid of your copper phone line – the exchange has to support ‘voice over fibre’. The home equipment has a couple of phone line plugs (see picture) if the exchange allows, then you can have your copper line removed we think, although there is usually a fee for that. The ISP Andrews and Arnold recommend subscribers retaining a copper line for voice in these early days. We don’t know yet if Turville Heath and Nettlebed will support voice over fibre at launch.

There are two specialist British ISPs that support FTTP and have a published price list both of which have excellent customer service, light years removed from BT. BUT we don’t yet know if they will offer it in our bits of Oxfordshire. As the links below to their FTTP pages show they both have different pricing and connection fees.

Andrews and Arnold

and
Zen Internet

And as ever if you do not subscribe to the new service then there is no improvement at all in your existing line.

The kit that goes into your home is in the picture

If you are on a traditional/terrible BT ‘home hub’ router, you will need a new one. The new BT Smart Hub is very good, but any WAN router (sometimes called a cable router) will do. Get one with ‘Wireless AC’ to see a massive improvement in your wifi speeds – such as this one.

I have asked OCC to update its web page on FTTP as it was out of date and they seem to have improved it a bit.  

Over thirty people turned out at The Crown Inn on a freezing night to discuss bringing Village Networks fast broadband to Pishill and Stonor.  Paul Firth and Roger Carey from Village Networks explained how they could bring wireless broadband to houses in Pishill by putting a small antenna up on the ridge in the vineyard.  It was a complex install – involving laying some fibre and power to the antenna that would cost £9,000.  If the community could find this money, then subject to survey, residents could get up to 30Mb/s broadband at the same price as BTInfinity.  The service could be running within weeks. More details on the service are here.  Someone from the community was needed to co-ordinate fund raising – there was much discussion afterwards as to who that might be.  Connect8 would be happy to be a vehicle to hold money, if someone was to come forward to organise on the ground.

In Stonor the service is already running from an antenna in Stonor deer park and a node will be installed on the barn at the Henley end of the village shortly.  The first customer to be connected from White Pond Farm was at the meeting and reported a good steady service at 29Mb/s not affected even by recent severe weather.

There is a good window for Pishill right now, VN are waiting to get an antenna on the police masts at Britwell Hill (the signal for Pishill will come from Stonor to an antenna, not Britwell) .  After that is turned on, VN will be busy connecting other communities.

To enquire or sign up use the contact details here. There’s a detailed set of questions and answers here.

  Long awaited but now underway!

The starting point for the Wireless Broadband service in conjunction with Village Networks was to find a source of fibre in our area.

We found that at Stonor Park and by courtesy of the Hon. William Stonor and his father Lord Camoys, we have today been busy laying fibre cable from the house to a hilltop site where we will transmit to the Thames Valley Police masts at Britwell Hill

  

First in line for connection will be Stonor and Pishill but and then via Britwell Hill TVP masts toRussells Water, Cookley Green and Maidensgrove to follow and in other directions where BT coverage is not an option

Its taken two years, loads of meetings and head scrathching but we’re underway