DCMS Minister fuses his first fibre for Cyberbarn

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Read more! The Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP today (yesterday for many of you!) cyberopened Cyberbarn by fusing a length of fibre which, in an ideal world, would have been wrapped around a laptop sporting a presentation about Cyberbarn as there was no way in his Olympic schedule to get him through our door in Warcop. Nothing ever quite happens as you expect......

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



The Olympics event overran by a whole hour, which left Cumbrian businesses and campaigners without a moment to see Jeremy before he had to hotfoot it to Carlisle for his main purpose of the day - the Olympics, sport etc. Somehow, our MP Rory Stewart persuaded Jeremy he could spare the broadband group 5 minutes. ECCBF (East Cumbria Community Broadband Forum) spoke about the ethos, purpose, structure etc we are exploring, which is a message which needs disseminating more widely as Cumbria is a pilot for these things with BDUK and that £830M. Other pilots should be talking to us just as we need to talk to you.

Jeremy *had* to leave to get to Carlisle. But we (read: Lindsey) simply couldn't allow him to leave without fusing some fibre in Cumbria in 2011 and opening Cyberbarn (although the real world opening still falls on Rory's shoulders, and if you have two minutes, please ask BT Open Reach CEO, MD etc for the loan of their new super shovel for that occasion!).

I am extraordinarily grateful to John Colton of Lucidos for pointing out to me when I rang yesterday and said, "I don't want to sacrifice any of my fibre so he can 'cut a ribbon'..." that we were going about it the wrong way. John turned up with a splicer so Jeremy could fuse fibre - sweet!



And then Jeremy signed our Cyberbarn certificate (which had been made by me when I thought he was going to leave the building without even a minute to spare to meet us).



It's been a very long day - I have just got home. I can't even begin to write how I feel. I hope for all of you following on Twitter, this will do as a start. Thank you everyone for your support in making Cyberbarn happen and for your ongoing support of me, in particular. It has been much appreciated recently.

(Oh, and as someone who used to make videos for a living, yes, I know they are not perfect, but I was presenting and filming as my video monkey has only just got home from her 18th birthday celebrations last weekend. So, no, if you're interested, she doesn't take after her mum even a smidgen!)





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Day 1: rural broadband experiment

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Read more! 6 people in total through Cyberbarn. No-one was allowed to use Youtube, Facebook or anything else as I am now disastrously protective of the data allowance. This doesn't exactly make for a fun online experience but as I seem to be paying, can you blame me? This is how any rural family will be forced to behave at £15/GB. Here's what we spotted today..........



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



Cleaning windows, talking to old friends, gossiping about the soap opera that is our village, even with anywhere between 3 and 5 IT savvy folks in Cyberbarn who don't actually appear to be touching a computer, uses anywhere from 3/4-10MB each 30 minutes. That was on the satellite which is currently operating at 64kbps whilst we negotiate the new contract. (Apparently, I should be ashamed to admit this speed, but I am very grateful to a supplier willing to talk to me whilst I also endeavour to track down someone from 3 with some authority to help this experiment proceed for at least one month using data as we wish to).

My maths isn't great at this hour, but hopefully @yarwell or someone will do the sums and work out the necessary info to show how 20.4MB at 64kbps in 30 mins works......

So, at 6pm, we were operating on this 'about to be 6Mbps but right now 64kbps' satellite and then Mr Popham walked in with the WiBe. His first speed test was 2.7Mbps. It was posted on Twitter. Bear in mind, Upper Eden is an area where the few sad folk amongst us who care report the tiny patches of 3G connectivity, mostly high on the fells (usually MOD land), in case 3G is ever required. Most ISPs will not sell a 3G dongle to anyone round here as the tests have clearly shown nowt is available. The WiBe proved otherwise and I have to admit to being instantly impressed.

Not having enough cat5 ends to crimp through to the load balancer and share this minor upgrade in connectivity, we all just decamped to the WiBe wifi!! This is where I spent too much time eating fishcakes whilst finding the usage stats, a car went off the road, the village soap opera erupted, and luckily, tomorrow is another day!

However, there is a post script to day 1: the speedtest I received from my own house via @johnpopham indicated a 3.7Mbps down and 1.49 up from his WiBe. I showed this to the people from the Haybergill Centre who have had a nightmare broadband scenario for far too long. Mick was sceptical for about 2 secs before reminding me there is 3G somewhere up on the MOD ranges behind them. I reminded him there wasn't in the village, but this bit of kit had found one. The WiBe is going up there ASAP to see if it may, once and for all, resolve the problems up there with the need to get online. So, big tick to @johnpophma for solving yet another Can't Get Online Challenge problem.

How do I feel: tired. Happy. And very, very sad. Why are we so pleased with a 3.7Mbps speedtest from a £200+ WiBe which has a £15/GB tariff? This could end up costing (on my home usage alone) 28 days x £15, £420/month in excess usage, to do the nothingness that I can do now. After three months of that level of usage (which obviously I would have put a stop to as soon as I discovered it as it is way beyond my personal and business resources) we could have put in FTTH.

I've always argued that the economic dynamics of FTTH must be looked at from a far wider view point than purely the telcos' profits. Right now, I am going to stand on top of the reality of Day 1 and shout out to you all: FTTH makes far more sense for everyone's pockets - telcos, councils, consumers, parishes, SMEs etc.

So, day 1: overall, sad. Bloody impressed with the WiBe and want it as an adjunct to my FTTH - can you build a femto cell into it too? Pleased to have better connectivity than CCC, CLEO and BT Global can provide from the fibre that lies less than 300m from my house, but so sad that rural folk are being so dreadfully curtailed for no good reason. And will be for many more years if this lunacy continues much longer.











Allow the geeks to touch a computer, their iPhone or a tablet, add a WiBe (thanks Richard!!!) and the stats go steadily and unceasingly upwards. Chuck a John Popham into the mix with Cant Get Online Week blog posts and photos to upload, and the TX/RX got into telephone numbers (it was measured in bytes, but even so!)

I'm still trying to resolve the WiBe stats (has anyone out there got a minute to help this very tired individual make sense of it all?) to actually clock what we did today but my calculations actually have us over 100MB for just over 2 hours (which is sort of terrifying if you only get 2 GB a month), but I am happy to log start/finish data from now on as today was a tad haphazard!

(Unpack WiBe whilst trying to eat my fishcake breakfast at 6.30pm, monitor stats asap, enjoy the company whilst dealing with developing Parish issues, and dragging a UK ONline learner out of a dark/hidden ditch!) Bit full on I thought but never a dull moment here ... ;)









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Making the Final 10% the First 10%

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Read more! As per previous post, we are now running an experiment to prove that FTTH is the only solution, for most rural remote areas by looking at the options, costs, usage etc. We are not saying there is not a place for satellite, mobile or even FiWi, but we will prove that FTTH makes more sense AS THE PRIMARY CONNECTION for the vast majority of homes and businesses in this country. We need a wireless/mobile cloud whatever, and there are always going to be places where a satellite makes sense now and for the foreseeable.

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



Thanks to AFL, Lucid, ITS and others who are coming at us too thick and fast for a quick blog post like this, our next phase is about to begin now Cyberbarn is open.

The mile of fibre has landed. The dig is being prepared. If you want to be involved, watch this space or drop into Cyberbarn.

And very soon, B4RN will be announcing how to do rural FTTH over a much wider area on an economically viable and logical scale.

I'll be digging for both of them and continuing to support communities who want solutions, and who need options. Come and try mobile and satellite at Cyberbarn before you make any decisions, and read all the open source information that is available that clearly shows now why the Final Third and Tenth should be the first, and why it makes more sense to invest the money into that sector for long term economic payback than in towns and cities.
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The Final 10% Rural Broadband Experiment

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We are going to set to and provide the hard evidence required on paper to prove that mobile and satellite are insufficient for AFFORDABLE, ACCESSIBLE, PRESENT DAY INTERNET ACCESS in rural areas for your average family, farm, business, OAP etc. What we intend to prove is that the payment pain for these and any next generation solutions is going to fall heavily on the users, whilst the telcos get off scot free from investing in long-term answers already obvious to all. This could no doubt offer excuses for yet further delaying tactics from incumbents, ministers et al through said evidence but hey ho............

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



Cyberbarn is now open (Mon, Weds, Fri, 1-7pm if you care to drop in). It is already connected to a satellite dish and in a few hours it will also enjoy a mobile broadband connection through a WiBe lent by Rural Broadband's Richard Dix as part of John Popham's Can't get Online Week - cheers all!

Each GB of data over and above 2 per month (under negotiation and a tad pathetic compared to that permissible on most ISPs FUPs for town dwellers - 30 in my house and then £1 per GB thereafter) will cost us £15. There is NO funding for data (not even, yet, a generous mobile or satellite provider to allow us to capture stats without constant reductions on speed during the month - hint, hint) so guess which mug is paying or who in this rural community will suffer when I can't pay for data before food?




Looking at the current usage on the satellite by a normal everyday family (who featured on one of Rory Cellan-Jones' broadband news items a couple of years back about dial up agony before I put the satellite in), and the mobile usage by myself and a couple of others round here, we are all going to be paying more in bandwidth than in electricity, water etc, simply by opening the doors of Cyberbarn and encouraging people to Get Online as MLF wants us to. But, hey, I bet the implications of that doesn't hit the news as hard as the next electricity or gas price hike.

We are all constantly told that satellite and mobile will solve the final 10% so having installed Cyberbarn deliberately in that space, let's see.

(For those who are not aware, there is no ADSL available to any of the premises around or beyond Cyberbarn as it is too far from the exchange. The nearby village, approx a mile down the road, is almost entirely sub 2Mbps, according to both anecdotal data, speedtests, and the BDUK and Ofcom stats for Cumbria which we mapped a while back). Oh, except the Primary School but that is a whole other story dying to be told.

If anyone wants to see what happens when you allow the peasants free access to (halfway fast) data - 6Mbps on the sat and we'll add the WiBe speedtests to @cyberdoyle's cyberwave as soon as we are wired in, feel free to send £15 for a 1GB top up on either the WiBe or the satellite to keep them operating at their 'full' speeds. Not that I am expecting anyone to give us 1GB of data, but if you feel you should for the purpose of a decent experiment, UECP (the Upper Eden Community Partnership) can provide a Paypal account for Cyberbarn. Just comment below if you want one or if you know/are David Dyson, CEO of 3.

I think we know what the reality will be, but hell, let's give it a spin and prove it to those who refuse to believe us that fibre to the home is the only real solution. After all, who will be £1250 out of pocket, per home, if the peasants are paying monthly data tariff fees of £15 per GB rather than telcos putting in a 25-50 year solution for that money?

I'm going to go into this in more detail shortly as I find it deeply offensive that govt can dish out £950M and expect at least £6 per £1 private investment back for industry, and not even begin to apply the same thinking to consumers with the BDUK money. How many £££s is the BDUK cash stimulating from private investment and how much will be dragged from our pockets without ever being accounted for? The pilot projects in Cumbria alone must have already put in tens of thousands of pounds of private money and we haven't seen a bean invested yet in connectivity.

Perhaps this is just yet another tax on those of us who "choose" to live in rural areas? £1 or less per GB in town on a bog standard ADSL or cable connection vs £15/GB in the campo doesn't quite add up in my mind. When our average earnings are already only 63% OR LESS of you city dwellers and our fuel is 10+p a litre more and the hospital/supermarket/courts/County Council offices etc are 40 miles away compared to your 2-5 miles. And our connections don't work and we are being hit with 15 times what you are paying per GB (a DVD is 660MB and our mobile libraries no longer stock DVDs as we can apparently download them.....).


I could go on with how our lives are costing us more and more to produce food whilst city folk and Westminsterites pay less and less for it.

(Don't believe me that we really are?

WE produce your food, that's your steak out of the Cyberbarn viewing window. Cyberdoyle produces your milk.)

Add it up. Rural folks are being taxed out of existence and the digital divide is widening rapidly.

But, enough moaning. To work. Let's see what we can prove in the comms arena for Neelie, Jeremy, Ian et al....

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Big Society Hurdle Busting

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Read more! I sat on the doorstep of Cyberbarn tonight, waiting for two of our seriously active community campaigners (have you voted for Libby yet?)

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



When these folk arrived, just after I had spoken to Rory on the train as he came home to his constituency, we took Cyberbarn to pieces and reconstructed it. I am very lucky to have people like this around me. So is Cyberbarn.

Every hurdle we currently face will be removed by our Big Society barrier busting team. And people like Julie and Libby.

Watch this space. Cyberbarn is knocking down hurdles that it seems County would prefer stayed in place for at least another year. No chance. You will be voted out at the next election and we will make sure that your actions about bringing broadband to the Final Third are made public.



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AFL Telecommunications have given me the best birthday present ever!

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Read more! Who wants flowers?! I'd like to send a huge public thank you to all the team at AFL Telecommunications......

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



AFL have sent me 1 mile of fibre as a fab gift, in time for my birthday. This means that the Cyberbarn project (which received funding as a UK Online Outreach Centre yesterday) will be sitting on top of a very fat, future-proofed fibre connection back to the village.

I cannot thank AFL enough for their support for this project, and others in the past. AFL's involvement in rural FTTH shows exactly how community and industry partnerships can work to move Digital Britain forwards. So, to Barry, Graham, Jo, Jane and Steve, a massive thank you.

More on the Cyberbarn project at the Colloquium and there will be regular progress reports here as we turn a farm building into a unique Fibre Training Centre, cybercafe, ONline Centre and, more than likely, my second home!

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