The Rural Broadband Partnership does what its name says on the tin!
This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com
RBP was founded by Lloyd Felton, who is Director of County Broadband and is now supported by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), Country Land and Business Assocation and many other regional organisations.
The website offers all communities and parishes who are planning a community broadband network, or who already have one in place, the chance to join with others. The map clearly shows how many communities are getting on with providing high speed broadband, and not all are rural. There are quite a few missing though so if you know of a project, add their details or encourage them to add themselves to the community broadband map.
RBP has presented parishes and communities with the ideal resource for accelerating deployment of next generation access, both to rural and urban areas. As it moves into its next stage of development, with growing support from a wide range of organisations, RBP will be bringing together the information required for any Parish to self-organise to bring NGA to its community. The Final Third First campaign highlights what an enormous issue the potential market failure could prove for this country - both economically and socially.
1 comment:
Lloyd is doing a great job, and this is the way to implement NGA throughout the country. The problem as I see it is as Barry said in an earlier Radio Lentil podcast, the backhaul.
Communities can't afford it on the current charges from BT wholesale. Distance from POPs is the problem, and if they are ever going to get a futureproof connection any public funding has to go into the digital village pumps. Once one community gets a pump and utilises it in the way Asby are doing the next community will get motivated to do similar. After years of working in a community I know it is very hard to get people motivated if there isn't an available/affordable source of internet access. Once we have digital village pumps we can really put all our efforts into helping the communities exactly in the way that Lloyd describes. Until then all we can do is what we have been doing for years, which is implementing makeshift networks using whatever technology we can get our hands on. I know Lloyd is doing a great job in his neck of the woods, but many are really struggling along in the notspots. Far better to harness all this energy and build it right. There are many community networks which could really go from strength to strength if they could just get access to a fat pipe. If they fail then rural areas will get stuck with BET - for the next few decades.
chris
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