FibreWalk - every step a challenge

Tweet

Read more! I'm not a dancing fool, despite what some may think, and learning all the steps for The FibreWalk has been tough. And it has exposed some of the real problems this country faces in meeting its (broadband) aims. But it has brought the possible solutions far closer. I think it is time to teach many more people how to do the FibreWalk.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com


Many moons ago, I wrote and spoke about public private community (PPC) partnerships. As I recall, it was just before PFI and public-private partnerships became all the rage. Sadly, over the years, there have been few if any successful PPC initiatives in the broadband arena in the UK - or none that I can think of. In fact, more often than not, what we see is quite the opposite.

Often we get an unpleasant insight into public, private and community "egos" who, instead of working together, pointlessly pull each other apart. Working against each other rather than together. Whether for profit, or pensions, or perks - the motivations ruin any chances of successful solutions. It's time to bin that egotistical and self-serving approach.

We all know FTTH is the optimal solution. We know that there are many reasons that hinder progress. But it is only when you bring together the three ingredients which have been integral to EVERY event I have ever organised or been involved in - Public Sector, Private Sector and Community/Consumer, that it becomes clear what is required to get this country where it need be broadband-wise. I've been quite content to watch the terms I have coined - FiWi, JFDi broadband etc - "borrowed" without even a credit, but where has it got us if you lot all insist on working alone in your silos?

Work together, people.

So, enough talking now - we've talked the talk. Now, let's Walk the Walk.

This week, I was privileged to go on a walk across beautiful rural countryside with people for whom the technological problems of delivering FTTH are their every day bread and butter. It was ace! BUT....what is new to the techies, as it is for many including BT and VM, is rural FTTH. It's very different to digging up urban estates and roads. Literally every step proved to be another reason to stop, talk, discuss, problem solve etc. And at that point, you start to understand why the #FinalFraction is quite difficult. Whether it is 10% or 30% - how do you reach that final fraction with FTTH? That answer is not fully clear right now when so many are playing their own game.

However, projects such as B4RN show it can be done. And the transparency behind B4RN shines a light on the failings in far too many other projects - cards held close to chests, a failure to be open and honest, the focus on money rather than achievements, etc.

What can and must be shared, without it being abused by fat cats and greedy guts, is how the people that live in rural areas solve problems. Grassroots and community solutions have been developed over centuries, especially when these communities are a long way from the decision makers.

The FibreWalk was completely eye-opening. Each step opened all our eyes to both problems and solutions. All surmountable, as it happens, but fascinating in the different approaches taken by each side. I say "side" to emphasise the failures highlighted earlier in this post. There are no sides - we must work together.

Local knowledge can reduce costs. Technical know how can provide insights into the 'right way' to do things, so we can then apply local knowledge to make future-proofed solutions happen from the outset. A dyke, ditch, culvert or beck may appear to need drilling for the professionals. For communities, you go and find where the farmer's water pipe runs under that watercourse. Simple. And we ask the Environment Agency to start looking urgently at consents for works around water courses etc in tandem with the community needs.

Need to know what utilities are in this field? Well, this field belongs to X and according to the farmer I just asked, the owner should be moving sheep today from A to B, so let's look for him and ask our questions. And LISTEN to the answers. Engage the farmer, the person who knows this land far better than any other.

BT can't ask this type of question, nor can VM or any other commercial player. Not without paying. But local people can. And you can guarantee that by the time you have located said farmer, he already knows you are looking for him. Rural jungle drums don't need mobile coverage as much as those who have lost touch with the land - I've decided farmers are psychic!

Want to build a rural FTTH network in the UK to the Final Third, Tenth, Ninth or any other fraction? Then you need all the players to work together. This is not 'divide and conquer' time, nor a land grab, nor a chance for some civil servant to secure their pension on the back of it. It is time to put aside egos and profits, and work together.

We need folks in wellies walking across the countryside, looking at each bit of the fibre route and resolving each problem as it presents itself. Whether that is connectivity into ManAp, TeleCity, EuroIX, or using Electricity North West's poles to cross the countryside using existing infrastructure, or demanding that BT remove the failing copper and aluminium from ducts that need fibre in, or asking farmers to share their intimate knowledge with their own land.

It is time to work together. Stretch the money taken from the BBC coffers (which we have all paid into) as far as it will go to achieve what is required for the NEXT GENERATION.

I am getting bloody bored of saying it now but there is a bit of the FiWiPie for everyone. Even the greedy who are only looking to line their own pockets - and boy, has broadband brought those out of the woodwork in droves.

Stop trying to rip off those who care about this land and the people who live here. We need FTTH, not 11 alternative technologies that will require yet more funding very soon to be future-proofed. Or technologies without sustainable business plans that rural Parish Councils accept because of a lack of professional advisors on their side. Nor State Aid arguments that scare rural businesses and residents from making sensible choices, or ill-informed media reports.

What we need now is to JFDI and Do It Right.










Read more!

CAN in a BOX

Tweet

Read more! Once upon a time, probably late at night, I had this idea to empty my inbox of all the questions that were beginning to inundate me, by creating a FAQ, a wiki, a road map, a hand-holding guide to community networks. I think this was about 2000. By 2001 ish, it had a name - Community Access Network in a Box. I was knocking around with artists and musicians at the time, and the round peg in a square hole seemed about right for many aspects of my life, then and now!

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



CAN in a Box has over the years struggled to see the light of day. (The most recent iteration of it has been living in a box under my desk, and is about 10-15 250 sheet pads of notepaper, handwritten and organised into chapters. Another serious quantity of it is, I think, in a garage many miles away. I hope they have used it to light the fire as seeing it again is not in my game plan).

No-one would fund it, and no-one really cares for my scribblings!

However, there are some ideas which simply refuse to go away. I am getting more than a little accustomed to not being credited for my ideas, and the outright theft of others to suit people's career, income and ego-boosting plans is irksome. But it doesn't stop the ideas waking you up at all hours - day and night - to write them down! And give me the freedom to organise an event, as I have been about broadband since before the vast majority of this country knew what it even was, and I always found an opportunity to push CAN in a BOX.

But, develop a simple term like FiWi (2004, Bethnal Green with FreeToAir Adam - notes available) and the world and his lobster thinks they thought of it in 2008/9. Or was it later they coined it? Oh, who cares? I know where it began.....they were not there.

A network for people doing community broadband (1998 - phone and email, Arwain, John etc in Cambridge, Daniel and a host of others) and a couple of years later, that becomes lost in something which I understand will be launched again in a few hours, by one of the late arrivals whose thunking I really miss having access to, as version 5.2 or wherever we are now to support community broadband. (You heard it here first. CBN v 5.2 is coming at ya! And knowing nothing, I believe this time it may have a chance.....)

But may I yawn?!

Why is it all taking so long? We are not surrounded by total morons, bureaucratic idiocies can be kicked in to touch courtesy of Big Society now (but that's not a new concept for us Brits!), and I came in after a 10 year fight, so it has now been - get this - 25 years trying to do FTTH.

Let's move the pace up, guys.

13 years after I actually finally started to make contact with people who thought like me in the UK - I'd spent 2 years drifting in an IRC world of informed geeks who didn't speak UK English, and civil servants who found me foisted onto them by heads of department and ministers who didn't have a clue about these 'fat pipes' I needed to run my rural business, it seems CAN in a Box may have found a moment in which to reach the real world. And I am sort of hoping that some of the other great ideas like the Association of Broadband Communities, which became CBN, then INCA, may now have found their time to exist in a positive and purposeful manner.

I think this is a record though. I know from experience I am an absolute minimum of 4 years' ahead of what is called 'innovation' in this country in the broadband arena, and every sector that it touches upon - rural sustainability, rural development, eco housing, small business growth, environmental issues, etc. But 13 years? Hell, I can hardly recognise my writing from that long ago!

I know it's summer, but I have barely been out doors for weeks. But the energy does get through my duvet cover cum curtain to inform me that others are bouncing off this extra light we have.

Now, folks, all you need do is direct that light down fibres to every home. Stop believing the BS, stop pandering to people in overpaid jobs who know nowt and do less, in case they upset someone with a massive pension deficit and , sorry, but really, JFDI.

Read more!

Weekend Discount on all the JFDI books

Tweet

Read more! If you haven't bought the JFDI Community Broadband Trilogy about villages which have built their own broadband networks, now is your chance. 20% off all the books until Monday. Just enter code "GIANTUK305" on Lulu when you order.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



Happy Reading!
Read more!

The EMDA Toolkit - you need IT

Tweet

Read more! I've been pushing this for years as an approach to CAN (Community Access Network) in a Box - the roadmap required for communities to build their own networks. Whoever produces CAN in a Box, I think it needs to meet the format of giving communities the questions they need to ask, NOT the answers they are seeking. Answers will undoubtedly be out of date before the Toolkit is produced, and the answers will differ for each community. But the questions won't!

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



I've just spotted the name of someone for whom I have a deal of respect - Alan Srbljanin, who I came across when quizzing Mason Bros about the Toolkit and how we could extend it to include communities during the CBN supporting communities era. That was way back when I was organising the End Game conference in 2004/5.

If I could reach under my desk right now and not distract myself reading through every meeting note since 1995, I'd find my phone conversation with Alan and re-run it for you. Suffice to say, I put the phone down with a huge grin on my face. Here was an RDA person who really, truly got IT.

In London last week at the Tweetup and in other meetings, I was asked by more than one person to link to the EMDA Toolkit on the blog so here it is.

EMDA Toolkit for IT, property developers, councils, communities etc.

Bear in mind when it was written and look beyond the possible changes and focus on the STRUCTURE of such a resource. And then buy Alan a drink.
Read more!

Showing some moral fibre in the UK

Tweet

Read more! Few of us are willing to pretend that sweating the copper asset is good. Because it is only good for BT shareholders. And even that is now debatable. It certainly isn't an option if we want to take on the world. Right now, with the plans available from our incumbent, the UK would struggle to competitively take on anyone for FTTH by 2017.

Is that what we want as a nation?



This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



It really is time that people stood up to BT in this country and made inroads into the necessary infrastructure investment and deployment that is required to get us back on the road to innovation and implementation.

We can pretend that FTTC, Cornwall, Infinity, and multiple other farcical announcements are good for the country. Or we can JFD what is required. Luckily, there are many who believe that copper is only good for socks, kettles and bracelets, and who know that BT is not required to deliver any level of 21st century network deployment.

New non-BT exchanges are being built as I write, and it is time for every community to realise that you do not need, nor want, BT Infinity if you wish to get to a Chattanooga or Korean level of connectivity. Not just sooner rather than later, but AT ALL.

It is time to take BT out of the first mile entirely. There is a place in FiWi Pie for them, but as a wholesaler. Openretch has had its day.

We need to climb out of the box, and understand that the biggest 'drag' on this country's move into 21st century comms is the company we gave an ageing infrastructure to, and failed to apply functional separation to.

Luckily, we no longer need that ageing copper-based infrastructure, nor the companies around it, and each and every community can build its own community broadband network in this day and age, without requiring the incumbent's involvement. We don't need new quangos either - time to JFDI.

So, let's start.....

Read more!