Backwaters in rural England getting non-BT gigabit broadband Rural English villages that almost nobody has heard of are set to receive broadband connections that are nearly fifty times faster than the national average. Baywood, Wooton, Dry, Sunningwell, Boars Hill and others will benefit from infrastructure being rolled out by small telco Gigaclear, which is laying fibre to the premises …
You're right, Average Joe most definitely doesn't need it. It's interesting though that a small ISP shows BT that it can be done. Question is how profitable that is, because if it's not generating any money for the ISP, this new shiny super-fast broadband service might be a very temporary offering.
I have gigabit, I have trouble saturating for more than a few seconds at a time, but saturating it is not the point - I can stream content at decent bitrates from home to my mobile devices (well, when Three play ball), I can play video games without worrying about any latency issues at all (1ms ping ftw), and cancelled my "hobby" colo box and replaced it with a small box in a cupboard.
I have lower latency to $JOBs colo than I do when I am actually at $JOB. I can video conference with 8+ people in HD without having the annoying dropouts that others do, and all of this means that I can spend more time working from home, since I only have to go in to $JOB when I have face-to-face meetings.
BT actually wired and lit my flat for FTTP, but their FTTP offerings are lame lame lame - artificially asynchronous and limited to 300Mb/30Mb, when what comes in to the Openreach box is 1.2Gbps. Plus, it is (was?) £15 more a month.
It translates to "Internet that just works" - multiple video, music streaming, games, Skype/Facetime/Whatever, small business home hosting if you're that way inclined, all working at the same time without congestion.
And most people won't use anything close to the full speed limit, so it should stay robust for a while.
Where I live BT and the local council are only just getting around to considering the fact they don't want to upgrade the village from the current <1.5MBps "broadband" because greed and stupidity.
So if this telco-in-waiting wants to expand south and west a bit, they'll find a lot of customers.
Yup - that's exactly it. You don't really notice it's there - everything just works as it should.
Same issue with our local council here as well (preferred to stay with BT for some unknown reason), until it was pointed out that half the village would be put at a disadvantage, and they changed their mind. Other local councils are the same - often because they just don't understand why people would need more than a few hundred kbits to read email...).
FWIW, there is at least one location I know of where the *residents* refused to let the installers come into their (non-private!) close because they didn't want the road dug up. The 4xconnection pots got installed at the end of the road, up to 40m from the houses they are supposed to serve and they carried on! Their loss!
Cameron had an upgrade a couple of years back, though some of your downvoters and naysayers apparently may not have noticed:
"More than 3,300 Chipping Norton homes and businesses to benefit from BT’s £2.5 billion roll-out
Prime Minister David Cameron today welcomed the arrival of high-speed fibre broadband in the Oxfordshire village of Chipping Norton, which falls within his Witney constituency.
The sophisticated technology is now available to more than 2,600 Chipping Norton households and firms – and this will increase to more than 3,300 premises as engineers complete the local investment in the coming weeks. Chipping Norton is the 19th Oxfordshire exchange to be upgraded and the third in the Prime Minister’s constituency. Witney and Carterton were enabled last year."
[continues]
21 May 2013
http://www.btplc.com/News/Articles/ShowArticle.cfm?ArticleID=78973A16-0FBA-40B4-BA4E-FB6109572671
Gigaclear still need to connect to the big guys fibre backbones!
Anon (stuck in a village that had its Gigaclear fibre installed to the homes months ago, but still has no connection to a fibre backbone, after the multinational company that was planned to be used, refused the order at the last moment.)
Speaking of which the following line popped out...
Links from the Gigaclear cabinets to the backbone are 10Gb
I may be missing something but there'd presumably be a fair few customer lines headed into a cabinet hence I get the distinct impression they'd be desperately hoping people "buy but don't use" when it comes to those gigabit connections.
....that higher speeds will lead to less conflicts, and therefore they can have a higher contention ratio (and ROI) without upsetting the customers?
I don't pretend to know the economics of being an ISP but it might be for practical reasons rather than to assauge the vanity of potential customers. I'd be interested to learn the informed views of others.
My guess is that they are offering gigabit because:
a) the fibre they are using supports it
b) they can easily get cost effective equipment that supports gigabit and reduces the need to roll out an upgrade in a few years
c) they can manage bandwidth usage via configuration
I don't believe there would be any significant cost or scalability difference between fast ethernet and gigabit ethernet at this point in time. Contention will be handled at the interconnect points with other ISP's rather than at the customer or local exchange level (assuming local exchange traffic is less than 10GbE or a multiple of that.
I live in one of the villages with Gigaclear and have the 50MBit package. The offering of GB connections is largely pointless (though I know some who are taking it to do hosting at home...) but the point is that Gigaclear have come along and offered a connection which is better than BT could ever do, especially since in places, BT have ruled they won't do the upgrade to 21CN in the near future (in our case only half the village would get it...).
Having previously had a copper ADSL with speedtests down in the 600Kbits (above the 500kb threshold that Openreach set for action...) the guarantee of reliable broadband at acceptable speed is a no-brainer for many, even if they don't *need* 50MB...
And yes, several of the villages are in the Witney constiuency, but Gigaclear started off over the Thames in Blackwood's constituency, and also have extended into other areas. Around here there is much high tech industry (motorsport, science, 2 large Universities, etc) and lots of people who commute to London who can effectively take advantage of home working - this might seem like a good demographic to sell to, no?
I throughly recommend it if you have the option - and as a bonus I now have no services offered over BT provided infrastructure :)
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Having read the comments to this I guess you all live in citys.
I live in rural Lancashire and I get 2megs max (with no hope of upgrade, not enough population to wire us up ) from BT , with the increased bandwidth requirements from the www this is getting increasingly useless.
Luckily there is a project called BAR4N which is community based project to wire up the the villages in this area with fibre.
So I have a choice 1 gigabit or 2 meg !
BTW what is this 3G that people have been talking about for so long ?
The problem with rural broadband is economic, not technical.
If you price it to make a commercial return, no-one can afford it. You go bust.
If you price it affordably (under cost) then;
-If you're a commercial enterprise, no-one will lend you the money to do it. You go bust.
-If you're a not for profit, no-one will lend you the money to do it. You go bust.
-If you're a regulated telco, you'll be breaking the law on monopolistic behaviour. You go to prison.
The only two models that can work are some kind of community enterprise funded by an angel investor, or a commercial enterprise with government subsidy.
Nothing else works because the price people are willing to pay for fast broadband is lower than the cost of providing it.
I too am one of the Gigalcear villages in Oxfordshire.
Firstly a correction to some of the Village names in the report about to be connected: It's Bayworth rather than Baywood and Dry Sandford rather than just Dry.
The service is excellent - it just works, everyone gets full speed all the time with full FTTP. It is a symmetrical service and you can buy either a 50/50, a 100/100 or a 200/200 service as well as the 1000/1000 service.
As some of you may know, Gigaclear works though the local community. If it gets 30% of the residences to sign up to them they will build the network in the village and put a connection pot in for each and every house regardless at the front land boundary. If they don't get the 30% then they go elsewhere.
The community does a lot of the marketing work themselves. Gigaclear encourage a local committee to be set up to spread the word, write articles in local newsletters, distribute leaflets - help out at GC organised open days, and endlessly explain etc.
Also help out sorting out who owns what land, contacting landowners so that the cheapest route for the fibre cabling can be used, helping out siting of the village cabinet etc. It is actually a lot of work - I know - was on the local committee and it requires people to actually do things and attend regular meetings which have defined actions.
Getting the 30% is much more difficult then you might expect. Yes, readers of this forum and other techies will sign up like yesterday but many people simply have other more urgent things in their lives to be bothered about than broadband. You also need to factor in that a fair number of people do not want their verges and gardens dug up for FTTP - this is a far bigger factor than you might think.
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