What does our MP John Howell say?

Posted on February 21, 2015 by peterdr17

“”Dear Jillie

I agree that broadband should be treated as a utility.

John””

“”Dear Jill

I share your frustration but I’m afraid that it is not possible to give you the definitive answer you seek. As the rollout progresses new information becomes available. In addition technology is improving all the time and thus the reach extends with the percentage of properties not covered decreasing. You may have seen the press reports this week on additional funding for Oxfordshire. It is anticipated that we will have a better understanding of the next phase of the rollout in the middle of this year.

I would love to be able to give you a precise answer but information is just not available. That said, I can assure you that I am well aware of the huge frustration felt by many and it is among my personal priorities to do all that I can to ensure that we get the best that we can in South Oxfordshire.

With best wishes

John””

John Howell OBE MP FSA

Member of Parliament for Henley

House of Commons

London, SW1A 0AA

howelljm@parliament.uk

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Broadband on the South of the Chiltern Ridge – the masts are a huge asset if we can work out what is connected to what

Posted on February 19, 2015 by William Perrin

I am reporting here an article I originally published over on Howe Hill site, before Connect8 got going.

The south of the Chiltern ridge is blessed with several large transmitter and mobile phone masts.  From the huge cold war complex at Stokenchurch to the police masts on Britwell Hill via the old MOD/USAF/RAF microwave relay site at Christmas Common and many in between.  It’s an isolated rural area with steep hills which made it attractive to put transmitters there – this same geography though means modern civilian broadband is hard to come by.  We are generally too far from the exchange on the plain.  Many of the areas in which the masts sit are in the ‘last 5%’ to get broadband or have been written off by BT/Openreach.  The masts though can form part of a modern broadband solution in several ways, with some lateral thinking:

the masts are usually (but not always) connected by underground cable to the phone network. This is how the radio signals that go to and from the mast connect to the network.   These cables run in ‘ducts’ – hollow bits of pipe  that the cable is fed through. These ducts can provide a route through which modern fibre can be laid to the place where the mast is.  Then a telecoms company can provide a cabinet at the mast from which broadband can be relayed to isolated villages.  Having a duct can vastly reduce the cost of a fibre connection as you don’t have to dig a trench.

masts often have their own telecoms cable which has spare capacity on it – a standard traditional telecoms cable has ’50 pairs’ of which the mast might use a dozen for signals to the mast.  The rest is spare.

mast infrastructure was often installed especially for the masts and so does not touch the mainstream retail telecoms network that supplies phone and broadband to villages on long circuitous routes laid out in the 1960s.  Masts can be on a far more direct route to the exchange

masts give a way of bringing broadband to the area through microwave – as the masts can be seen for miles broadband can be beamed to them wirelessly and then relayed locally on the normal wires, taking a few miles out of the route to the exchange.  BT has done this for a few villages – including Northlew in Devon. You can have more than one service running on a mast – hence the proliferation of dishes and antenna in Christmas Common.  It might also give an option for competitors to BT.

masts could also act as relay points for a small network on the Chiltern ridge and its dip slopes and valleys such as Pishill, towards Turville Heath etc. This could be something BT’s competitors could do too.

Why hasn’t this come up before?

Firstly, the masts aren’t a ‘consumer’ thing – they are a special ‘wholesale’ service from one telecoms company to another and just don’t enter the conventional ‘retail’ thinking when you ring up BT or Openreach.  I had to ask a series of pointed questions to get information about the Britwell police masts from the County Council and Openreach that hadn’t registered in their thinking about how they could help us.  Tackling the challenge of the last 5% needs some unconventional thinking that throws everything at the problem.

Secondly there are ownership complications – masts are often owned by a private company (not BT or Openreach) such as Arquiva who lets space on them to telecoms companies and broadcasters or, worse possibly owned by the MOD.  So any use of them by the community would have to be negotiated.  As the police own and still use the Britwell Hill masts it might be easier to do a community deal there.  In some cases the mast owner might also own the ducts running to the exchange.

Thirdly the masts often have a military or national security legacy and don’t appear on the maps used by Openreach.  This is a legacy issue dating back to the cold war  – these masts aren’t secret any more – the police for instance will happily answer FOI requests about their pair of masts on Britwell Hill (as they have to me), which they put on their public asset register. There are plenty of conspiracy theorists who love talking about the probably redundant RAF microwave relay site in Christmas Common including people who have climbed it and these people and was mentioned in the House in 1955 etc etc.   Also the ridge has line of sight to several active RAF bases including the colossal NSA  station atRAF Croughton.  But within BT culture there is a hang over of secrecy.

So overall there is lots of potential to use the masts to improve local broadband if we think imaginatively. But we need the help of OCC and BT/Openreach and their competitors better to understand what is connected to what.

Posted in Britwell Hill, Cookley Green, Greenfield, Howe Hill, Maidensgrove, Park Corner, Pishill with Stonor, Russells Water, Swyncombe, Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

What the papers say!

Posted on February 18, 2015 by peterdr17

On most days you will see an article about superfast broadband and another on the problem of immigration from Eastern Europe.

The fact is that the Romanian capital of Bucharest has a faster broadband service than most of this country and the politicians have to come to terms with the fact that it should indeed be treated as a utility to allow us all to prosper.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

February update

Posted on February 18, 2015 by peterdr17

Connect8 – the campaign for fast broadband in our area

What have we achieved so far?

The answer is quite a lot in a comparatively short time. Following first discussions in October/November of 2014, the objective for December was to create an awareness of our campaign to find a way to bring fibre broadband to areas of South Oxfordshire that would be excluded (3%) from the coverage proposed by the Better Broadband for Oxfordshire programme. We have tackled this through our web site, which gives a considerable amount of detail and will grow as the campaign progresses, a leaflet drop and initial media publicity.

At the same time we have been engaging with a number of key stakeholders in respect of studying potential solutions including BT, both from a consumer relationship and technical delivery aspect and other companies involved in alternative technologies who might provide certain pieces to our complicated puzzle. More latterly we have made contact with Thames Valley Police in respect of the potential of sharing mast facilities to provide all important starting points for distribution.

Our campaign has produced responses from almost 200 people so far, within the area defined on our site and representing a wide cross section of residential and business requirements. We are looking to widen the locations to take on board other neighbouring areas, as we have received extensive reporting of poor and sometimes non-existent broadband causing considerable hardship and even loss of business. From barristers to IT consultants, from retired folk to students and a large number of key creative and support people, the story is one of utter frustration and despair that our requirements are being ignored and a belief that Connect8 can navigate a way through the levels of bureaucracy and politics that are ever apparent.

We are fortunate to have some dedicated people leading the campaign and our February meeting gave us enough details to plot a specific course not made easy by a failure by BT to realise that the subscription take up in our area would probably be at least four times the national average with many of the respondents working from a home based business.

Connect8 started as a request to extend one of the key objectives of the Howe Hill Community Led Plan to a wider area – fast broadband to give our communities the chance to grow with up to date technology as opposed to the inevitable shrinkage that is the alternative. Property values are affected, young professionals forced away and everyone else totally frustrated through a lack of online connectivity. The natives are more than restless – local authorities are certainly aware of Connect8 and further steps are now needed. A local councillor suggested that these things are best left to those who are elected but the outreach areas and neighbouring communities have been badly overlooked and Connect8 has taken the lead.

Peter Richardson – Campaign Co-ordinator  February 2015

visit www.connect8.org – join up and spread the word!!

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Thames Valley Police – can we share the Britwell Hill Masts?

Posted on February 12, 2015 by William Perrin

It’s possible that the police radio and mobile phone station on the top of Britwell Hill could be useful for broadband to our communities.  I have written to one of their radio engineers who manages mast sharing with some questions. Here’s the guts of the email:

We are looking at our options for bringing modern broadband up to the scattered rural communities around the top of Britwell Hill, where your mast site is – at the moment no one in the hamlets around there can get more than 0.5mbs many can’t get anything at all. It’s a long way from Watlington Spring Lane and Nettlebed exchanges. We are scoping our technology options with OCC, SODC Openreach, BT and some altnets – some of which might involve the mast site. With respect to the masts there are two issues – bringing higher bandwidths to the top of the ridge and distributing that to local communities.

We should be grateful for your views on the following issues we are exploring – some technology, some economics.

Could you tell us a little about the site – what it is used for?

We understand from Openreach engineers on the ground that direct ducting may exist from the Britwell Hill mast site to Watlington Spring Lane – but Openreach are having trouble confirming this. Do you know if this is the case? This could be enormously useful to us if it is a shorter run to Watlington than the long path the retail telecoms follows.

We understand that backhaul from the ee and Airwave(?) antennas is via a Megastream product from Watlington. Are there any plans to upgrade this for your own use or to allow you to offer leases to 3G or 4G providers?

Would you consider allowing Openreach to put a fibre cabinet onsite (paying a commercial rate for power etc) for retail use locally?

We are talking to a couple of companies about local microwave distribution direct to small antennas on homes (eg AB Internet) which seems a more cost effective way of serving scattered local hamlets. Could you lease space on your masts for that and associated cabinets?

Would you consider a bundled approach where TVP and a microwave provider (say) and the community club together to improve backhaul to the masts from which we all benefit

I notice today that the government has published basic maps of public sector owned networks and points of presence including MOD (the police i presume is in a later release) to help with issues including broadband. Can i plant the thought with you that, if connect8 sets up a local charitable vehicle for broadband around britwell hill and there are solutions involving TVP masts we could negotiate a community rate for their use?

If it’s easier to discuss this over the phone then give me a call sometime on

Posted in Britwell Hill | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

What are our alternatives to BT broadband down the phone line?

Posted on January 19, 2015 by William Perrin

It seems that some rural communities, hamlets, farm businesses may never get modern broadband down the phone line for the reasons set out in my recent article.  And we are on notice in connect8 from BT and OCC that we may well be in the last 2% that get written off.  What are the other options?  Are there other companies who could help using different, cheaper broadband technology?

The other technologies are all radio based – ie radio waves transmit the broadband to and from your house or business like your TV or satellite or phone signal.  I know that many local people can’t get a mobile phone signal but there are sometimes ways of tackling that, which I explain below.

Microwave

Not the oven, but set of radio frequencies from which the oven got its name.

Connect8 has approached a company called AB Internet that delivers high speed internet by radio to see if they can use a local radio mast to provide broadband using microwave frequencies in the area.  This means no wiring to people’s homes, just a box on the wall outside which should be possible without planning permission.  They can deliver quite high speeds this way both up and download.  When looking at the website don’t be misled by the coverage checker, they also sell satellite.  There is also a company in rural Kent using similar technology.  We would probably have to deliver a certain number of subscribers to make this possible.  AB Internet is doing a survey and business case for us as we speak, promised in late January.

There are two good local companies that use slower technologies.  Countryside Broadband  in Woodcote use microwave to provide 10 mB/s to the surrounding area.  When I moved to Britwell Hill we asked them if they would extend to us but they had no plans – we shall check back to see if a bigger bloc of customers could persuade them to move.  Over in Bucks is Village Networks with a focus on Hambleden.  Their standard service is 5mbs download.

There also seems to be something going on in rural Kent where perhaps the council is more imaginative than OCC in rural areas.  There are two companies there i mean to check out Callflow and vFast.

For all three of the microwave services they would need three things:

a mast with power supply to transmit from, preferably for free or at a reduced rate (it would be great if space on the police masts at Britwell Hill could be offered by Thames Valley Police as a community contribution or MOD at the Christmas Common microwave tower)

connection back to the national telecoms network, known in the trade as ‘backhaul’  (something we lack at local masts) and

enough guaranteed customers to make it worth their while investing.

BT doesn’t really have a microwave product it can offer consumers, but, if BT buys ee it could try out some of the technologies they have in trial.

3G and 4G

A small external aerial can transform your ability to receive 3G and 4G.  The aerial then plugs into a router that provides you with wifi and Ethernet ports.  I have a Poynting antenna (about £80) and one of these Huawei 4g/3G modem routers (£140) with an ee 4G sim.  If someone can pick up a 3G or 4G signal say in your garden or the street outside your house or across the road but you can’t get it in your house then this sort of set up could work for you.  I don’t get a 4G nor 3G signal in the house on my iPhone, but I do 50metres away in the field.  The antenna on the side of the house picks this up and gives me four bars out of five on ee4G, coming from somewhere on the plain.  But you need to experiment with the aerial and SIM cards from different networks.  And be wary of data caps.  I find it can also be a bit weather dependent.

With less fuss a WIBE can be as good – an easy to use 3G signal booster – it’s the size of a large coffee jar, has all highly sensitive the antenna inside the box and simply provides you with wifi from 3G. You just plug it in , pop a SIM in and off you go.  I understand a 4G version is in development.  This is good but not as good as an external aerial – WIBE do make an external version.

3G and 4G solutions if you can pick them up will work off the current network. So, if it works for you is ready to go. And both the above tend to pick up signals where you don’t think one exists.

Satellite

Satellite broadband is a mixed bag – you need a dish and it provides good download speeds for watching iplayer, software updates, etc.  But it is fairly hopeless at uploading stuff which is important for two way skype, video skype, google hangout, playing computer games etc.  It can be expensive too.  There is a good ‘hybrid’ service from Onwave which can use a weak DSL line and the satellite and pair them together.  But again is expensive. I have Onwave hybrid as my main connection and it works well when you know its limitations.

Dig your own

In the Lake District the B4RN (broadband for the rural North) project, even more isolated than our hills has taken matters into their own hands and dug their own trenches, set up their own internet service provider and laid their own fibre.   We may yet get to this – but it’s possible that a strategic bit of work by a local farmer with a mole drainer and some ducting could make a connection viable at some point – maybe connecting a mast or short cutting across a field instead of following the roads.

That’s it for now – if you have any questions please drop me a line (william at cankfarm.com).  It isn’t just about the technology of course but also the business model and affordability for us as a community – on which i shall write more shortly.

Posted in Britwell Hill, Cookley Green, Greenfield, Howe Hill, Maidensgrove, Park Corner, Pishill with Stonor, Russells Water, Swyncombe, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Media coverage of other rural communities with broadband problems and technology solutions

Posted on January 1, 2015 by William Perrin

I’ll occasionally write a post with links to media coverage of other communities around the UK who have trouble getting any or modern broadband.  And cover as well any new technologies that seem promising for us in the South Chilterns.

Wales – in rural Wales Openreach has deployed fibre optic cable by stringing it from telephone poles for a record distance of 15km. This is hard to do as glass fibre is more brittle than copper wires. But they emphasise how much work has to go into extending a clapped out rural network – Ed Hunt of Superfast Cymru  says:

‘Every single green roadside cabinet is a project in its own right. It’s got to be planned, you’ve got to put a concrete plinth down, you’ve got to bring the cabinet to it, you have to bring power to it, you have to bring fibre to it, it has to be commissioned, it has to be safety-checked. There’s a whole series of activities.’

In Cumbria a technology that could be promising in hilly South Chilterns is being trialled.  This Mesh technology brings broadband to one house and then uses microwave radio to sort of daisy chain houses together locally.  So there is no need for wiring and each house does not have to be visible from a distant radio mast.  This makes it much cheaper and quicker to install.

‘New EE micro network changes the economics of mobile coverage by removing the requirement to build large masts and install sub-ground cables….The micro network can connect communities of around 100-150 homes and businesses, across an area of 0.5 square miles with just three or four small antennas. An antenna can be installed on to any building in just a few hours, and planning applications are not required’

It’s interesting that ee is involved in this – they are the only operator i think to have deployed 4G locally (from somewhere near Christmas Common). It’s good to have a major company behind a new technology.  It’s not superfast (yet) at 5mbs but a lot of people locally would kill for a reliable 5mbs service.

Over in Herefordshire villagers in Fownhope have had some success with a campaign for a better mobile phone signal benefitting from Vodafone’s Open Sure Signal campaign to tackle rural ‘not spots’ .

‘What is Open Sure Signal?
It’s a low-powered 3G mobile base station, just a bit larger than your home broadband box. It works with a local broadband connection to create a 3G signal.

What can it do?
• Each Open Sure Signal provides up to 500 metres of 3G coverage.
• If you’re on our network you’ll be able to use the 3G signal as long as you’re in range of a unit.
• Working together, all our Open Sure Signal units will offer coverage across your community, ensuring you never lose
signal.’

Of course there is a chicken and egg here – you need to have some local broadband (4Mbs) to get one of these working, but it might be relevant for some of the Connect8 communities.

In rural Shropshire, people seem to be as fed up as local who are contacting Connect8.  They too see government money going to subsidise people who already have a functioning broadband service, not to those who have barely any or no service at all and are in the most need.  This heartfelt appeal from a farmer in Middlehope near Craven Arms reported in the Shropshire Star will sound familiar to many in the South Chilterns.

“My house is situated down a lane two miles long, the telephone lines passing through much woodland on the way,” he said. “We have reported numerous faults to BT for both landline and broadband. In 15 years we must have had in excess of 50 engineer call outs. These call outs do not reflect the other countless occasions when the service has just drifted back without the need for an engineer call-out. At one point we were without telephones for more than a month.  I personally must have spent three working weeks pleading with BT for a better service, or any service at all.”

If you have spotted any articles you’d like me to share here please let us know.

Posted in Britwell Hill, Cookley Green, Greenfield, Howe Hill, Maidensgrove, Park Corner, Pishill with Stonor, Russells Water, Swyncombe | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Why BT broadband might never be the answer for some of us

Posted on December 21, 2014 by William Perrin

For some of our communities in Connect8 standard BT broadband might never be the answer – no matter how long we wait.  Rural, sparsely populated areas like some of the Chiltern escarpment and outlying villages face physical challenges that BT’s broadband over phonelines will always find it hard to overcome.  There are other technologies we need to explore as part of the cCnnect8 campaign to give us a chance of getting decent broadband at all and a path to higher speeds in the future.

Problems with BT’s phone line technology and broadband

BT broadband relies on a long wire from the telephone exchange to your house.  The broadband signal fades as the wire gets longer, until it fails altogether at about 2.5 miles.  It’s the same laws of physics that mean you can’t power an electric lawnmower by plugging together five long extension leads – as the line gets longer the voltage drops off until the lawnmower won’t work.  In the 1960s and 1970s when most of our houses were put on the phone, the line was connected on a long circuitous walk and villages were daisy-chained together, increasing the distance to the exchange.  Some are literally at the end of the line.

I am 2.5 miles from Watlington telephone exchange at the end of the line but the phone line goes on a circuitous route and I barely get any broadband. To counteract this fundamental problem BT has to put expensive bits of kit in the line that either create a shortcut to the exchange or lay some optical fibre (which doesn’t have this problem) or find some other way to get the broadband signal here.  All these options are expensive – to continue the lawnmower analogy this is like digging up the lawn to put in a new socket so you don’t need the extension leads – rather messy, time consuming and expensive.  And BT has said it won’t do it for us.

More powerful broadband – 20mb/s and above makes the situation worse because the higher bandwidth signal doesn’t travel as far.  And solutions are more expensive.

Tress, hedges, water

Other rural issues make BT broadband hard.  In the Chilterns we also have the problem of lines lost in trees and hedges – vegetation that has grown up since the 1970s.  The constant friction of line on tree branch wears away insulation, water gets in and the signal quality goes down – if you have a ‘faint’ phone line or occasionally hear ‘fax’ noises or whistling on the line then this is often a cause.  BT and Openreach stopped maintaining trees and hedges under their lines many years ago and require fairly forceful encouragement to tackle this issue.  Broadband signals are particularly sensitive to this sort of interference – it adds to the distance problem and cause severe problems even if you are close to the exchange.  My own phone line is completely invisible in a vast hedge several fields away and BT can’t even deliver me a line with a digital signal of any sort on it.

Rural dilapidation

There is also a sense that around us BT/Openreach rural telecoms equipment the lines connect to in cabinets and stuck to telegraph poles exposed to the severe weather is generally dilapidated.  The same economics that make BT/Openreach unwilling to invest in commercial broadband in our area has led them to neglect their kit, or prioritise urban equipment over our rural lines.  One junction box near us on Howe Hill is completely full and can’t have any new lines added to it.  In an ideal world it would be upgraded, but there seems to be no move to do so.  Badly maintained, corroded kit can add to the problems of getting modern broadband.

All in all for some rural communities, hamlets, farm businesses or houses this means  we may never get modern broadband down the phone line.  What are the other options?  Are there other companies who could help using different technology?  There are companies out there who can help using other technologies than a 1960s bit of wire – and indeed so can BT if it is minded to – this will be the subject of my next blog post.

Posted in Britwell Hill, Cookley Green, Greenfield, Howe Hill, Maidensgrove, Park Corner, Pishill with Stonor, Russells Water, Swyncombe | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

BT and Openreach let us down on quote for broadband upgrade

Posted on December 15, 2014 by William Perrin

We asked BT at Director level in October for a quote to upgrade the broadband infrastructure on Howe Hill to modern standards – both to describe the technical approach and how much it would cost.  This is really important to understand what is physically possible with the local infrastructure, who would benefit and how much money we might have to raise as a community.  It could be an important template for other communities in the South Chilterns.  BT and Openreach (who do the network and wires) have let us down – the work was due to report now – but today we learn that they seem not even to have started it.

In late October Peter Richardson of Howe Hill and (now) of Connect8 secured a meeting with Peter Cowen, BT’s ‘Regional Partnership Director for the South East’ who promised that he would:

‘use the services of a survey expert Colin Brooks from Openreach to produce a costed recommendation as to the best solution and to check out all existing infrastructure‘

Colin Brooks of Openreach (they do the cables/network and used to be part of BT) is their regional expert in ‘gap funding’ where the community pays for part of the infrastructure – Mr Brooks has done loads of projects for communities that won’t be subsidised and BT say isn’t commercially viable.  They end up in a letter like this which sets out what BT would do and how much a community/council has to raise.  We were led to believe that we would have the results in six weeks.  This time has now passed and Peter Richardson chased Mr Cowen for an update who writes:

‘…I have also just spoken with Colin Brooks (Openreach lead) – who does have Howe Hill on the list to present full surveys and costings for … but he has just told me that it is not currently “in process”.’

I first contacted Openreach in September to try and work out our local options and now it’s nearly Xmas and we’ve got nowhere.  Although my frustration with them has at least driven me to contact wireless providers who compete with BT – more on that soon.

Posted in Britwell Hill, Howe Hill | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

We need to hear about your broadband thoughts …

Posted on December 5, 2014 by peterdr17

The Connect8 campaign is a grass roots, non partisan  movement launched by local people in late 2014 to bring modern high speed broadband to at least eight local locations in the South Chilterns that BT have said they won’t fully connect.

For more information on the campaign please see our Broadband Mission and the form on our Campaign sign up page where we are collecting people’s stories about how hard it is for local people to live modern professional and family lives with dire local broadband.

We are still getting going and would welcome any further thoughts, expressions of support etc you might have on the comments here.

Posted in Britwell Hill, Cookley Green, Greenfield, Howe Hill, Maidensgrove, Park Corner, Pishill with Stonor, Russells Water, Swyncombe | 7 Comments