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Rural Broadband Options (help)
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[Deleted User]
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Hi There,
I live in the small village of Farnley Tyas. Our internet is awful and we are not on any of the rollout plans for fibre cable. We have had a community meeting and we are looking at options. However, none of us are that tech savvy. The two options that I am aware of at the moment are :
1) Run our own cables to the village. We have permisison from local landowners to dig into their fields to lay cable. That is about all we know at the moment, how easy is this to do? Coudl someone explain the ins and outs (as if you were tlakiing to a child, I really do not know enough on the subject)
2) A nearby village has superfast broadband already. We hear that it is possible to set up a big transponder in the other village and broadcast it over to us. As you can tell form the way I have worded it, something we know VERY little about. Any info would be appreciated.
3) Anything else you can suggest.
I have emailed just about every rural supplier and none of them are interested so it looks like we are going to have to do this on our own. We are 2 miles from the nearest exchange. Boffins, ASSEMBLE! (Please help).
I live in the small village of Farnley Tyas. Our internet is awful and we are not on any of the rollout plans for fibre cable. We have had a community meeting and we are looking at options. However, none of us are that tech savvy. The two options that I am aware of at the moment are :
1) Run our own cables to the village. We have permisison from local landowners to dig into their fields to lay cable. That is about all we know at the moment, how easy is this to do? Coudl someone explain the ins and outs (as if you were tlakiing to a child, I really do not know enough on the subject)
2) A nearby village has superfast broadband already. We hear that it is possible to set up a big transponder in the other village and broadcast it over to us. As you can tell form the way I have worded it, something we know VERY little about. Any info would be appreciated.
3) Anything else you can suggest.
I have emailed just about every rural supplier and none of them are interested so it looks like we are going to have to do this on our own. We are 2 miles from the nearest exchange. Boffins, ASSEMBLE! (Please help).
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Most people around here now use 3G / weak 4G for their home internet, we've all given up on BT, largely because BT gave up on us.
Not that easy or cheap. What would happen if one of those people sold their property / land in the future and the new owner was an a'hole who didn't want the cable there and removed it?, or didn't know it was there and damaged it whilst digging?. You need to get proper water tight wayleave style contracts drawn up, between all of the property owners, which would then be carried and transferred with any property sale. How you would do that, I don't know or whether it would even be possible - that would be one for the legal profession. But the last thing you want is to ignore the possibility and the first house in the chain closest to the village selling up and the new owner cutting the cable, essentially removing connection to every property further down the chain.
Its not just a case of digging a trench, it would have to be proper BT approved cable - usually special armoured style cable for direct burial, it may also need to be laid at a certain minimum depth and sometimes the requirement may be for it to be laid in conduit. Do you have experienced people to lay it? with the correct cable laying equipment to do it, insurance in place?, risk assessments done. What would happen if you happened to hit a water main, or underground electricity cable or other service? who would be responsible and who would pay for the damage?. Do you have access to the plans which show where these other services run, so you wouldn't risk damaging or disturbing them?.
How long would the cable be?, have you factored in any voltage drops and losses along the cable length?. Again, another reason why you need to use the correct cable. Sadly you can't just run a long LAN cable in this type of application, its not that simple.
Where are you going to connect it to, once its in the village?. BT aren't likely to agree to connect anything to their exchange, unless its approved by them and the work meets minimum standards and is carried out by suitably qualified contractors.
The clue to the huge expense and amount of red tape and legalities involved should be indicated by this
Legalities generally. Any high power transmitting equipment has to be licensed and approved for the purpose. A community wifi project is your best bet, assuming the 'feed' end is fast enough to run the number of properties you intend to connect to it. Your best bet is to get in touch with one of the many other local community wifi projects (Google it), and ask for advice on how to get started.
Leaving aside the legal niceties of running cables all over the place. What sort of cable were you thinking of running? If you ran phone cable then you may well be no better off unless the length of the line is very significantly less than the existing BT phone cable.
The length of the cable has a very real bearing on broadband speed. so running one 2 mile long cable to replace another 2 mile long cable may well have no effect at all. Unless the existing BT cable is really poor quality.
If you were to run a fibre cable then that could have an impact. But that would have to be run to an exchange with fibre equipment installed. Is your local exchange fibre equipped?
And have you any idea of the cost? It will be in the thousands if not tens of thousands to do the job properly and install the correct kit, especially if you go down the fibre route! And that is even if BT take pity on you and allow you to connect it into their network, which is not in any way a given. So you could very well spend a fortune laying in a cable that just ends up as bare ends at each end doing sod all.
Satellite Broadband?.
http://www.satellitebroadbanduk.com/our-broadband-packages/satellite-broadband-at-home
Not cheap, but if you had two or three neighbours who were relatively low data users and close to each other, then the larger package could probably be shared between them, reducing the monthly cost per property. Far easier and cheaper to run a length of external network cable across a couple of gardens, in a private agreement between neighbours and connecting router to router, than tackling the legalities of running one through the entire route to the village, and then hoping BT will give their blessing for it to be connected to their equipment.
There is currently a scheme in Wales to subsidise part of the cost of Satellite Broadband to homes which don't have High Speed ADSL and Fibre. Send the link to your MP, Get the local community and press involved and see if you can get a similar subsidy made available for your own area.
https://www.hyspeedbroadband.com/satellite-broadband-home/welshbroadbandscheme.html
to update your village to Fibre Broadband but it is not cheap
See here for details http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/the-big-build/Fibre-roll-out.aspx
Have you contacted your Local Council and MP?