The Nuenen Model

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And why it should be adopted in the UK....

Nuenen is a town near Eindhoven in Holland. There is a FTTH network there run by a co-op called Onsnet, which means 'Our Net'. Everyone who lives in the town has the chance to be a member of the co-op and receive 100Mbps symmetrical fibre to the home. There was a take-up rate initially of over 95%, which is fairly stunning, although it has dropped to 85% - a figure most EU ISPs are green about!

The co-op model allows the consumer to have a say in what happens with the network and how it is run. How different from the many UK ISPs who dictate to consumers what speed or quality of broadband is available purely on a commercial/shareholder basis, not on what consumers actually want.

Nuenen offers innovative health and education services over the network. For instance, those with heart problems who need to take regular exercise are plugged into cardiac etc monitors in the local gym and the results are fed live to the GP who can ensure that improvements are occurring, and prevent too much exercise, or the wrong type, being taken.

This is not the place to write reams about Nuenen as Adrian Wooster (who took my place on the first Oplan Foundation trip and therefore saw first hand all that is going on there) has written a book, Musings on Broadband which contains the case study, and the Community Broadband Network has recent news and papers on Nuenen.