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So, as the new kid on the blog I have been toying with what to write in my first post. Do I bemoan the state of fibre to the home in the UK? Do I denounce the government for not giving it enough support? Or do I be a little more proactive and tell you how I hope to become part of the change?

Well, I think the first two subjects are well covered (and I am sure to come back to those at a later stage!), so I'll aim to provide some updates as I wade through the process of starting up and running a Fibre to the Home project for my community.

It's difficult to know where to start. I have spoken with others who are far more versed in this area than I am and taken their valuable advice. They have coached me on the need to involve the community, perhaps even to the point of establishing a Community Interest Company or may be a Mutual. But of course I must first engage the community and how does one go about doing that? Well I'm not one for standing on street corners handing out leaflets so I thought I would try the local councils and MPs. After all, I would want their involvement in more than just access to the community - if they cannot see the benefits FTTH brings to their district and get behind it then what hope do I have? I am waiting for the replies...

So now I am in the process of putting together information that I will present to the various parties to demonstrate to them why they must be concerned about the current situation and why they should support my project. And this is a tricky issue... you see we can get a reasonable broadband service (up to 6MB on BT) so I can use iPlayer, YouTube, Facebook et al what could be the reason to ask for more than 15 times my current bandwidth?

I'll not bore you with the details now but will feed my thoughts in, as well as my progress, over the coming months. I'd be delighted to receive feedback, advice, encouragement and support. I'd also be delighted to hear of others who are looking to run similar projects in their communities.

I will leave you with this one fact I picked up at the FTTH Council Conference in Copenhagen. This is taken from a forecast of the European FTTH Market by Heavy Reading. They estimate that by 2013 the UK will rank 19th in Europe in terms of FTTH penetration. Behind Ireland and barely ahead of Turkey.