£2.1m Broadband Pledge from NCC

Nottinghamshire County Council is “chipping in” to the central government funding pledge to improve the county’s broadband access.

In August, the Government provisionally allocated £4.25m to Nottinghamshire County Council to improve broadband infrastructure county wide.  However with 23.7% of properties in Nottinghamshire having no or limited broadband access, the county council has decided to invest a further £2.1m.

Councillor Keith Girling, deputy cabinet member for culture and community, said: "At the moment we are losing businesses to South Yorkshire because broadband is better for them there.

"We've got to look at it sensibly. Rural areas depend on good broadband and it is up to us to make it happen."

But the county council said it needed Nottinghamshire's district and borough councils to match the funding to ensure the "vital" broadband improvements. Furthermore, the county council is seeking £8.5m from whichever telecommunications operator is appointed to carry out the improvements.  Work is not expected to start until 2013.

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Three Mobile, The Robin Hood of Rural Broadband?

The cynics among us may say that it is a shameless attempt to lobby Westminster for the valuable wireless spectrum.  However, but Mobile operators, Three, claim that their 3G giveaway is for the greater good of rural broadband. 

Three are giving away 3G broadband to rural areas struggling to get fixed line services.  First to benefit will be residents of Gringley-on-the-Hill in North Nottinghamshire who will receive 30 dongles and free data access for a year.  It will also get public WIFI hotspots in the local pub and community centre.  They hope to roll similar packages out to 10 communities across the country in the next twelve months.

In their commitment to isolated communities, Three has formed a working group with the Countryside Alliance and Race Online, the government-backed group that is trying to get more people using the net.

The company has made no secret of their desire to purchase the lower-frequency spectrum which can cover a much wider area and offers better indoor coverage than their current high-frequency spectrum.    

Jeremy Green, analyst with research firm Ovum, remains skeptical of Three’s true motivation. "It is not as if Three is concerned about lack of access. It wants to show off how good its network is and lobby for more spectrum."

What do you think?  Does Three’s motivation truly matter if the digital divide becomes less significant?

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Ofcom Demand Rural Broadband Pricing Should Be Cut

The digital divide between town and country looks to be shrinking, as Ofcom rule that BT have to cut wholesale pricing.

Currently, BT is the only operator with equipment in many of the smaller telephone exchanges, meaning that other ISP’s have to factor ‘renting costs’ into their pricing plans.  The result is that customers often miss out on cheaper deals available in towns and cities.

In cities, many ISPs, other than BT, are able to offer consumers cheap broadband through a system known as local loop unbundling (LLU), where they place their own equipment in the exchange.  This is deemed ‘less economical’ in many rural areas, resulting in pricing being affected by the renting costs. 

As competition rises, this could be great news then for rural customers; however, the telecoms regulator has not applied the reduced charges ruling to ADSL2+, a next-generation copper-wire technology which offers speeds of up to 24Mbps.  The hope is that BT focus on investing in the new technology. 

The pricing changes should begin from mid August, and under the ruling BT must cut its rates by 12% below inflation per year until March 2014.

In the meantime, Fujitsu is bidding for government money to create a fibre network for rural areas. Both Virgin Media and TalkTalk have said they will offer services on it if the bid is successful.

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Slow Take Up on Super-Fast Broadband

Last month, Labour MP Ian Lucas told the government to "pull its finger out" because as yet, no firms or technologies have been chosen to pilot next-generation broadband in the earmarked remote test areas. 

The government has pledged to make the UK the best place for super-fast broadband in Europe by 2015, and as a result, they are pushing ahead with a second wave of funding.

There will be a further £50m made available to local authorities around the UK.  It is estimated that the extra funding will help a further 800,000 homes to benefit from next-generation broadband.

North Yorkshire, Cumbria, Herefordshire and the Highlands and Islands, were all listed as pilot areas for test in October, however no firm or technologies have yet been chosen to be used in the tests.  This is the third of UK homes that are not economically attractive to firms such as BT and Virgin Media because offering next-generation services there would cost too much money.

"This is very much a locally-driven process and we encourage bids from all local people with plans for improving broadband in their local area," said Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.

For more information visit:  Broadband Delivery UK

Cheaper Broadband for Rural areas under Ofcom plans

This Summer, following a period of consultation, Ofcom are expected to publish plans that could mean cheaper broadband for rural Britain.

The proposal is that Ofcom will instill pricing controls on BT in parts of the country where they are the sole provider of wholesale broadband services.  This will affect how much BT can charge internet service providers (ISPs) in those areas.  The hope is that the changes could increase competition between retail ISPs.

The telecom regulator wants BT to reduce its wholesale charges by between 10.75% and 14.75% below the RPI measure of inflation. The plan could benefit an estimated three million homes and businesses.

Whilst Consumer Focus welcomed the move by Ofcom, they have highlighted the fact that in some remote areas people were still waiting for broadband to reach them, and the emphasis needs to remain on government plans for everywhere in the UK to have faster broadband by 2015.

Expansion promised for BT’s super-fast fibre network

Two-thirds of the UK is to receive super-fast broadband services as BT announces that it will expand its next-generation services.


BT originally promised a £1.5bn investment in its fibre services, offering speeds of up to 40 megabits per second (Mbps) that were due to reach around 40% of the population by 2012. However, with the announcement of big profits in the year leading up to 31st March they are now able to invest a further £1bn.


This investment promises to see the project roll out to a further 20% of the population by 2015 with the first four million people will be connected by the end of the year. The expansion of fibre services has been enabled by the firm's return to profit.


Many rural communities have become frustrated by the slow roll-out of fibre services and have begun to offer their own. Rutland village Lyddington broke away from BT after the telco said it was too expensive to offer fibre services.


After successfully "unbundling" the Lyddington telephone cabinet, locally-based Rutland Telecom has had enquiries from 200 other villages keen to do the same thing.

Smallest County - Biggest Broadband

A tiny village in Oakham has raised £37,000 to offer 200 homes the super-fast broadband that neither BT nor Virgin could deliver.

Getting fast broadband to rural areas has recently been an issue for political debate and is back in the spotlight as the government shelves its funding plans. The residents of Lyddington had tried all the big suppliers and had been told that it was not economically viable to provide fast services to the village. In the end they decided they couldn’t wait and have set up their own Telecoms Company.

It is estimated that around 2.5 million homes in the UK cannot get broadband speeds of more than 2Mbps. Award winning Rutland Telecom now offer the residents of Lyddington speeds of up to 40Mbps (megabits per second). The scheme was a joint effort between villagers fed up with slow broadband speeds and a local ICT firm that was reselling BT's broadband.



The process was a slow one but Rutland Telecom, with the help of Ofcom, have had their very own fibre-optic cable put into a street cabinet in the village. After two years of persistence the network is up and running and already has 50 customers.

 

"For the first time in UK telecommunications history the telephone lines of customers are completely cut off from the local BT exchange," said Rutland Telecom director Mark Melluish.

Rutland Telecom has been approached by 40 other rural community groups to see if a similar solution is possible in their area. It is on the verge of launching similar schemes in neighbouring Leicestershire and one in Wales.




Results by independent analyst Speedtest.Net demonstrate Rutland Telecom broadband speeds are over 3x faster than all other ISPs.