Over at the NextGenUs blog, recent coverage of the subject by BBC Look North with a focus on Lincolnshire and Dig Your Own Fibre!

Some excellent coverage on several initiatives here by Chris Benfield at the Yorkshire Post and a couple of quotes:

“Hull-born Guy Jarvis came back from Australia in 2001 and could not believe that Brits within shouting
distance of towns had less broadband than some customers in the proper Outback.

His company – previously Fibrestream, now morphing into NextGenUs – follows a business model, enabled in 2006, called a community interest company, which means it must re-invest most of its profits for public benefit. It has just launched a
demonstration project giving the Humber Lifeboat station a full two-way connection, enabling it to stream film
of operations to other agencies, such as coastguard and media, as well as downloading at top speed to “the
remotest spot in England” – Spurn Point, at the end of the finger of sand which steers the Humber into the
North Sea.

When we first reported the project, it looked as if the answer was to squeeze more out of existing wires from
the BT exchange, at Easington. But that would not have been fast enough. Another possibility was to run new
fibre-optic cable over the five miles – but the cable itself costs £10 a metre and the cost of digging and ducting
can easily make that £110. A cheaper option was to wrap new cable around the old BT wires, strung on poles
between Easington and Spurn Point. But BT’s charging rules made even that too expensive.

Satellite connections are costly and cause signal delays which are awkward for some applications. The
eventual solution, at about £6,000, was a superfast 1,000 megs-per-sec cable up a tower block in the heart of
Hull, to a transmitter-receiver array exchanging radio signals of 100 mps capacity with Spurn Point, 22 miles
away, over a series of relays. Actual initial test speeds were 40mps “down” and 20 mps “up” and they can be
tweaked up. The lifeboat crew and another thousand customers in Hull and Holderness will get a similar
service for about £20 a month for typical household needs, on a pay-by-use basis. A lot of city customers pay
more for less.

Mr Jarvis says: “We call it fi-wi – a mixture of fibre-optics and wireless. And it is probably the future for
thousands of communities. My advice to anyone feeling left out is: talk to your neighbours. On your own, you
are not going to get anywhere.”

“… the retiring chief executive of North Yorkshire Council, John Marsden, saw a chance to showcase how the council’s NYNET services might be expanded. He fixed £25,000 of funding and Mr Jarvis’s company put in a similar investment to set up a wireless relay, to Newton and on to Stape, from a NYNET connection at Lady Lumley School in Pickering, 14 miles away. About 50 customers pay up to £50 month for up to 10 mps with low contention. On the basic service, they get an actual four to five mps for £20 a month plus VAT.”

RNLI NextGen Project

Covers the RNLI Humber project and touchs on the key message:

Next Gen Access is not primarily about the technicalities of FiWi – it is all about people, community and choices.

FibreStream is planning on rolling out fibre to an estate in Hull. Working with the Goodwin Development Trust, the network could eventually serve 5,000 people.

For residents it offers a cheap way to hook up to High Definition TV.

“The triple play of voice, ultra-fast broadband and TV is attractive to people. To get even free HD content involves having a satellite dish and a set-top box and not everyone can afford it,” said Mr Jarvis.

But there are some very real social benefits too.

Read the full BBC Story here

see http://bit.ly/OWl4M

It is positively heart-warming to see the kind of FibreStream-led NextGenUs grassroots JFDI initiatives that are deliberately aimed at where the need is most, the 15%-20% of the population of the UK  who are are in Notspots and Crapspots for broadband today, get recognition and visibility by the BBC.

The pace of Community Centric FttH realisation is quickening, and about time too

Thanks Jane and Andy

Audio – 2H 10M to 2H 15M

Whilst that delay has been a source of constant frustration to the Next Gen pioneers, 5tth being a prime example, this blog another, there is an interesting inverted historical parallel going on here, worthy of closer attention.

The Industrial Revolution arguably was pioneered first in the UK and took a whole series of twists and turns, booms and busts to reach a mature modern industrial state, over the course of perhaps 150 years.

Other countries, the followers, were able to speed up their own Industrial Transformations faster precisely due to the lessons learnt from the experiences of the pioneers in the UK – what worked and what didn’t, how to most effectively achieve technology-driven commercial and societal progress in least time and at least cost.

This insight leads directly to the inverted parallel

- by the very virtue of being a laggardly follower, UK PLC has the de-risked opportunity to join the world leaders for 21st century technological transformation at a faster, cheaper and surer rate than our peers in communities spanning Korea, France, Japan, Holland, China, Belgium, USA, Poland, Canada, Spain, Italy, Slovakia, Rwanda

- collectively the global movement from metallic path to optical fibre connectivity.

FibreStream means practical delivery, radically reduced costs, with community interest at heart because that makes great business sense too.

Why?

Simplicity itself – without consumer-creators, Next Gen Access is worth nowt, hence 1st Mile not Last Mile (BT please take note!)

Fibrestream exists to realise sustainable 1st Mile Next Gen Access and provides a twin track choice for local communities everywhere:

1 – We help, support, facilitate, nurture grassroots Community ISPs that want to run their own NGA affairs directly.

2 – We enable future-proof community-centric open access choice for global IP applications, content and services direct to local communities that want the benefits of NGA without the hassles of operating and maintaining the necessary FiWi infrastructure.

So, now you have been energised by the BBC and are ready to realise Next Gen Access for your local community, to move beyond watching, listening, thinking to action then please get in touch and together let’s JFDI