Campaign to bring rural broadband out of the Stone Age
Monday, 1st March 2010
Stonehenge Broadband is a community-based project that aims to improve the low-speed and unreliable broadband internet service provided to Winterbourne Stoke and many other villages on the fringes of Salisbury Plain. Villages like Winterbourne Stoke are likely to fall into the 5% of the UK population which will not receive a minimum 2Mbps service by 2017, and be firmly on the wrong side of the so-called “Digital-Divide”.
The main problem in rural areas is that the local telephone exchange is a significant distance away from villages, and cabling is manufactured from poor quality aluminium. A combination of these two factors results in the average broadband speed being only 300-400 Kbps, a long way off the goal of 2Mbps. As a result, people are paying for services they cannot receive and have only limited access to educational resources, job opportunities, and government services.
In addition, regular repetitive electrical impulse noise (REIN), from an unknown external source, causes broadband connections to fail repeatedly, resulting in even slower speeds.
The cost to upgrade the cabling would be over £180,000 and BT have stated that this is not economically viable, nor are they under any remit to maintain such cabling, meaning communities would have to revert to “dial-up” should the already limited services fail altogether. Therefore, as USC is achieved across much of Britain; and high-speed broadband is increasingly viewed as an essential service; it is possible that in villages like Winterbourne Stoke the provision could become worse rather than better.
To address this matter Stonehenge Broadband (www.stonehengebroadband.co.uk) hope to work alongside Vtesse Networks in order to provide Very High Bit-rate Digital Subscriber Line broadband for a minimum of 30 premises in Winterbourne Stoke initially, but with the ability to provide this service for all premises within the village should they desire it. The solution is also to provide a backbone for subsequent phases of the project to provide similar capabilities for outlying properties and other villages in the area in order to make the project self-sustaining.
To fund this project, a business case has been submitted to the South West Regional Development Agency for Rural Development Plan for England funding of £50,000. The bid is being supported by Graham Watson, MEP for South West England, and advice has been sought from the South Wiltshire Economic Partnership, and Wiltshire Council in putting the bid together.
If you would like to know more, please contact: info@stonehengebroadband.co.uk.
Stonehenge Broadband hope to work with the South Wiltshire Economic Partnership in the future to bring our broadband out of the Stone Age.
Author: Sarah
