Bringing the net to Eden

Broadband for rural areas? BT says there is not enough demand. Now villagers living deep in the dales aim to prove them wrong, writes Ben Hammersley

Thursday October 3, 2002

The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,803023,00.html

My laptop is so far from bandwidth it has a nosebleed. In the village of Kirkby Stephen, in the Eden Valley, on the border between Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales, getting on to the internet is a major effort. With phone lines shared between remote farmhouses, and mobile phones a cruel fantasy, an internet connection here can drop as low as 12Kbps – if you can get online at all.

But all of this is about to change. EdenFaster, a local community organisation, is about to supply broadband internet connections to the entire valley, bringing 10,000 people, 500 businesses and 50 schools online with an internet connection 20 times faster than ADSL for half the price. They’re doing it on their own because of a “perceived lack of demand” by telecoms companies. They’re doing it wirelessly, and they’re one of the leaders in the new revolution in ways to deliver the internet in the UK.

Online readers will already know the benefits of broadband. The very fast, always-on internet connections have been available in the metropolitan centres of Britain for a couple of years now. Their benefits stretch far beyond being able to look at websites faster, or download MP3s all the quicker: they change and create communities. Education, medicine, local government, entertainment and jobs are all transformed if a constant internet connection can be depended on.

And nowhere else is this more necessary than in the dales. With the average wage only half that of the rest of the country, and a local economy dependent on agriculture and tourism, the introduction of broadband, says Lindsey Annison, EdenFaster’s project leader, will revolutionise the way the local community can live. The area’s scenery and relaxed lifestyle would be perfect for teleworkers if, she says, they could get online.

Mick Keeble, of Croft PLC, which is supplying the Cisco, Enterasys and Check Point kit for the project, says: “The kit itself is commonplace: it’s off the shelf. The only difference is how it’s being deployed and what it could lead to with respect to the quality of life for the people in this area.”

The nearest supply of substantial bandwidth is almost 30 miles away, but climb a nearby hill, and on a clear day you can see it. Stick a wireless connection on the same hill, and you can tap into it. Use the same 802.11b, or Wi-Fi, wireless technology as you find built into modern laptops, and you can beam the bandwidth down into the valley. Repeaters in the villages of Kirkby Stephen, Appleby and Warcop can then receive this connection and create a wireless “mesh” between the houses that each customer can then connect to and get online. Because this mesh acts as a local network, the system also creates a “walled garden” – where local services are delivered at even greater speeds than over the wild internet. The internet is reached via a “gateway” that can be restricted – perfect for the local schools. What’s more, with this approach, as each subscriber comes on, it only makes the local network technically all the stronger and more resistant to failure.

The “walled garden” (the Walled Garden of EdenFaster, naturally) is a clever idea. It will allow local businesses to supply local services, and it gives scope for other projects that would be much more difficult over low-bandwidth connections. Live video is one project, video on demand another, and EdenFaster is now investigating using Voice over Internet Protocol technology to allow for a voice service to replace the expensive and poor quality local phone service. Cabling, it seems, may soon be irrelevant.

The vast majority of broadband connections in the UK are with either cable television systems, or with ADSL, a nifty technology that converts standard copper phone lines into high-speed connections.

For rural areas, however, cable TV is not on the cards, and ADSL presents a number of technical problems. In much of the Eden Valley, the phone lines are aluminium, and not copper – rendering ADSL impossible. Plus, here, as in many areas around the country, it might not be economically feasible to install. BT Wholesale, which installs ADSL equipment into telephone exchanges, has set threshold figures of the minimum number of subscribers that must order ADSL before it converts the exchange.

This threshold is a matter of controversy. Earlier this year, the pressure group BroadbandforBritain.co.uk commissioned research into the exact number needed per exchange before they considered it to be economically feasible to install ADSL. Although BT quotes figures of between 200 and 750 consumers, BroadbandforBritain and the research firm Ovum, found a figure closer to 50 was high enough. Given a base of 40 residential and 10 business customers, “an entrepreneurial service provider taking advantage of the latest DSL technology would see rapid payback on their capital investment”.

http://www.BroadbandforBritain.co.uk

“It’s a long way from the 200 to 550 that BT are quoting,” says BroadbandforBritain.co.uk’s Andy Williams. He says the UK is missing “a cohesive nationwide policy toward broadband rollout, and there’s a lack of education about what broadband can do”.

For such a rich country, he says, we have a lot of catching up to do, and “BT, although it is a private company, it has a tremendous amount of public responsibility”.

BT disclaims the report. It says that because the UK is more hilly and the exchanges more remote than in the rest of Europe, at least 200 subscribers are necessary. It says the fact that other companies can gain access to the exchanges to install their own ADSL equipment – but haven’t – shows that it really isn’t feasible in many areas. At least without hundreds of customers. Plus, they say, they are involved in projects with radio meshes, such as EdenFaster, and satellite services, to try to find which solution works the best.

The cost factor, it seems, is key. Not so elsewhere, where national governments have been funding broadband rollout. South Korea, for example, has complete broadband coverage, its installation paid for by the government, and while the French, the Australian and the Canadian governments subsidise broadband rollout, here, the attitude is different.

The UK approach is to “establish a competitive marketplace” as opposed to just subsidising the incum bent providers. This is probably a good thing: the German broadband market, for example, is dominated by one provider responsible for 90% of all connections.

But the question of rural broadband remains. There was a one-off fund of £30m made available for regional development agencies to, in the words of a Department of Trade and Industry spokesman, “go away and look for ideas” and implement them as trials. It is from some of the remains of this funding – via the North West Development Agency – that EdenFaster hopes to get off the ground. Time is running out for similar projects, however. The money was made available last year, and there are no plans to extend this offering.

This might be a problem: the demand for rural broadband connections is growing. It is not limited to remote areas such as Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales, either. There are grassroots campaigns being pioneered all over the country, either campaigning for BT to install ADSL, or doing as EdenFaster is, and bypassing BT altogether.

One campaign, at www.pleasebt.co.uk, is run by Chris Maerick for the Hertfordshire village of Stanstead Abbotts. Only 20 miles from London, Stanstead Abbotts needs 200 people to sign up to have ADSL installed before BT will convert the exchange. Maerick has been collecting names. “If you just sit back, nothing is going to happen,” he says. So far, he has 33 local villagers on his list.

Back in the dales, Lindsey Annison is hopeful that their project will be a success. “EdenFaster will create at least one job within the community on top of the benefits of having the connection itself,” she says, and as long as they have one hundred subscribers they will break even. This will not be a problem – one poster in the village shop has already inspired 73 people to sign up, and that’s not including the schools and local businesses. Having been hit by the foot and mouth outbreak, the rejuvenation of the area is topmost in their minds – and many see access to the internet as key to this. Last year, Annison started Digital dales.co.uk to highlight the opportunities in the local area – opportunities that can only be made greater by the introduction of broadband internet connection.

All told, they need £150,000 to transform the area, create some jobs, and provide a possible blueprint for other rural communities. Tomorrow, the North West Development Agency will give them the verdict. We shall be watching.

* * * * *

Banging on the broadband door

The government and BT defended the pace of broadband rollout this week at the Labour party conference in Blackpool.

Angus Porter, managing director of the consumer division of BT Retail, admitted “trigger points” of consumer interest, at which telephone exchanges would be upgraded to offer broadband, were “higher than some people would like”.

But, he added, “the costs of providing the service are higher than some people would like”.

He said that enabling an exchange for ADSL requires a stable electricity supply, air-conditioning and a connection to the internet backbone, the last of which can be more expensive in remote areas.

The trigger points, which have so far been met at five exchanges, are at a level that would lose BT money if they were met precisely – although this loss cannot be too great, he said, or BT would be accused of uncompetitive behaviour by the regulator.

He said the company has to justify its spending to its shareholders, and that on the hundreds of millions of pounds already spent on ADSL-enabled exchanges, “the return to BT so far has been pretty poor”.

E-commerce minister, Stephen Timms, said that there were other ways to get broadband, pointing out that 40% of the country has access through cable television networks, and anyone can use satellite.

Timms said: “There’s still a third of the population not in range of an affordable broadband service.

“I do think it would be a significant mistake to provide [government] funding for broadband rollout on a significant scale.”

He said that mobile phone services, which now cover virtually the whole population, were built with private money. “Public subsidy would not just have been superfluous, it may even have been damaging,” he said.

Instead, the government is spending £30m on broadband pilot projects around the country, which Timms hopes will demonstrate alternative models of provision.

As to the UK’s poor showing in comparison to other countries,Timms admitted “we made a late start”, but added that “we’re now making very rapid progress”. He said the UK’s millionth broadband customer is expected to buy the service by the end of next week.

S A Mathieson