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RSS feedsThe small market town of Buckfastleigh, just off the A38 in south Devon, is a thriving and varied community comprising local traders and professionals to businesses and those who travel to Exeter, Torbay or Plymouth to work.
The population of some 3,600 supports a primary school, library, swimming pool, town hall and, for the past two years, an internet cafe. It's similar to hundreds of other similarly sized towns in the UK, but differentiates itself by having a broadband network.
This broadband service isn't courtesy of BT, though. It's a mixture of cabled and wireless links run by a separate, community-based project.
Buckfastleigh Broadband is the story of two people who wanted better online communications in their town, of a government keen to explore the best way to digitally enfranchise rural areas and of a country community that was surprisingly keen to embrace new technology.
It's also the story of some happy coincidences, unconventional approaches and of Wave, a public access point which became much more than an internet cafe.
Kathryn Hughes has lived in Buckfastleigh for the past 16 years. In April 2001 she was conducting her commercial surveys business from a cottage in the centre of the town while her partner, Gordon Adgey, was working as a telecoms consultant in London and travelled down at weekends.
Adgey could see the start of the spread of broadband in London and the difficulties Hughes had sending and receiving the many email questionnaires which were the backbone of her business.
Together they started what Adgey calls "a hobby project to get fibre to the cottage" - in other words to see how feasible it would be to get broadband in Buckfastleigh, bearing in mind that the main trunk cabling for transatlantic speech and data traffic runs down the side of the A38.
Having discovered that all the obvious providers, such as BT and Telewest, had no plans for Buckfastleigh, Hughes and Adgey were forced to look further afield for help, particularly with funding.
Almost on a whim, Adgey rang the DTI, to find that it had just been given £30m of government money to set up and run rural trials. These were intended to test the possibility of introducing broadband into country areas, often not seen as commercially viable.
Cash in hand
To make a bid for a portion of the £3.8m assigned to the south west, which was being administered by the South West Regional Development Agency (RDA), Hughes and Adgey had to come up with a project fitting the criteria.
This had three essential parts: creating a pilot broadband network, setting up a public access centre for broadband and the internet (the Wave internet cafe) and creating a series of Action Programmes. These Action Programmes should show what could be done with the technology and provide education in its use.
The RDA liked their proposal, but it took the best part of a year to get accepted and for funds to be released.
Hughes said: "The approach we took was not just a technological one, and I think that was key. Because we felt strongly that there needed to be a physical space ... Wave and the Action Programmes became a way of capturing people's hearts and minds."
Armed with a grant of £500,000 over two years, Buckfastleigh Broadband became a reality and work began in parallel on the two main elements, the broadband network and Wave.
Why wireless?
The Buckfastleigh Broadband team looked at several possible technologies for delivering broadband throughout Buckfastleigh and its surrounding area, including satellite, wireless and running cables.
The idea of running extra cables along the overhead power or telephone poles soon proved prohibitively expensive and fraught with regulatory hurdles, leaving the options of satellite or point-to-point wireless.
The satellite option had several disadvantages. It is by nature an asymmetric system, with a comparatively slow upload speed, and it has a relatively long latency, making it awkward for games players and others needing a quick response from the internet.
Also, at the time Adgey's team was looking at its options, it would have meant setting up as a commercial reseller, something they didn't want to do.
Point-to-point wireless was looking like a better choice, particularly when Adgey discovered a company called Orthogon Systems, based in nearby Ashburton, whose main business was research and development in wireless technology.
In exchange for some assistance in the surveying and installation of the core wireless infrastructure, Orthogon would have a wonderful working test bench for some of its development work.
For the purposes of the pilot scheme, the broadband pipe was provided via Buckfastleigh primary school. A separate government initiative, the National Grid for Learning, was due to run a 2Mbps pipe into Buckfastleigh Primary by 2005.
There was interest in the feasibility of linking small communities to schools' broadband grids in this way and, with a bit of wangling, the school got its connection early.
The pipe proved fine technically, and was used for the duration of the pilot project. However, there were access problems, because of the extra security and content restrictions necessary for internet going into schools.
It wasn't possible, for example, to complete some web-based transactions on the schools' grid, limiting its usefulness for online banking and internet purchases.
Wave
At the same time as the broadband system was being established, with nodes and aerials popping up all over houses in the town, the public access point, Wave, was getting up and running. The venue was a shop in the centre of the town's main street which had formerly been a launderette and cafe.
Hughes set out with some deliberately challenging ideas for Wave. For a start, rather than trying to blend in with its surroundings, she decided to make the cafe look very different from the other shops in the street.
She used an interior designer and ended up with a very modern and metropolitan look. Its five PCs and three iMacs sat on trendily curved coloured benches and tables with retro-styled chairs in white glass fibre and orange acrylic.
"Using people's curiosity and the gossip network is much quicker and more powerful [at promoting something] than virtually anything else," she explained.
Hughes was keen that Wave should be available as a caf‚ where people could nip in for good coffee, as well as an internet resource.
Hughes and Adgey also took an unconventional approach to publicising both broadband and Wave. As well as speaking to interested parties in meetings, they both spent a lot of time evangelising and spreading the word one-to-one in pubs and at local events, such as the annual arts festival.
The idea was to get as much from word-of-mouth promotion as possible. It certainly seemed to work, as within a few months Wave had many customers, and not just young gamers and local propeller heads.
The centre became widely used for a variety of activities, from people wanting to investigate their genealogy, to those keen to edit video, to groups of young parents on Surestart training schemes.
Increasing knowledge of Wave also brought in what Hughes describes as "a lot of very technically au fait people", many of whom were prepared to lend a hand helping in Wave or in further promotion.
It's this large enthusiast core that is one of the assets so valued by 1st Broadband, the company which eventually took over Buckfastleigh's customer base.
The villages
About three miles away from Buckfastleigh are two villages, Holne and Scoriton, with populations of a few hundred. Each village had several people who pricked up their ears when they heard Buckfastleigh now had broadband.
They included teleworkers, farmers and guesthouse owners - this is a popular area for Dartmoor walkers.
Although there were probably only a dozen people in total interested in taking on a faster link - and in the long term paying for it - Adgey felt it would make a good extension to the scheme to test the feasibility of linking these two villages to the Buckfastleigh network.
By setting up wireless nodes at key points within the villages, such as pubs, they could provide not only Wi-Fi links to several interested customers, but also set up hotspots in public places.
Several Dartmoor walkers, particularly those from urban areas, were amused to find a wireless hotspot in a working pub on Dartmoor.
The tests of the system, running at 3.5GHz, proved the links could work. Beaming from point to point, over about three miles, wireless connection was made to the two villages. Since last summer, people have been able to hook into the internet over their pints in the Tradesman's Arms.
Introducing 1st Broadband
About halfway through the project, at the beginning of 2003, Adgey and Hughes started to consider how it could be carried forward after its two-year funding finished.
They needed a commercial broadband supplier that could take over the demand, support their customer base and expand it to take in more as word spread.
1st Broadband is a young company specialising in providing wireless broadband in rural areas, so there seemed to be a near perfect fit.
The company's first broadband network was built around the Penwith area, right at the south-west tip of Cornwall, beyond Penzance.
There are around 100 homes and businesses hooked up in a Community Broadband Network (CBN).
The company has a rather different approach from many others. It's keen to be involved in providing the hardware infrastructure needed for wireless broadband, but tries to work in collaboration with small local companies and individuals.
In Penwith, 1st Broadband worked with its local partner to set up a wireless CBN, which has been running for over a year and covers a 70 square-mile area that encompasses six towns and villages.
The wireless CBN normally runs faster than ADSL and, potentially, customers can work at up to 2Mbps. The service is fully symmetrical, so uploads are as fast as downloads.
Hans Scheepers, managing director of 1st Broadband, believes his company can produce a commercially viable network where the big players can't, because " ... they are thinking wire only and there are limitations to the wires, and because we cooperate closely with the community".
Buckfastleigh Broadband came to an agreement with 1st Broadband in late 2003 to deliver a commercial broadband service to Buckfastleigh and to expand it to around 120 customers, hopefully by spring of this year.
The company charges a sign-up fee of £180 for a basic link, which includes connection kit (to Ethernet) and installation. After this, it's £25 a month for its residential service, broadly in line with the rates you could expect in many urban areas.
Where we go from here
Government funding for Buckfastleigh Broadband has now finished, but many of the people who signed up for the free pilot trial in the town have switched to paying for the 1st Broadband network.
It's early days, but it looks as if the 120-customer target can be achieved, making the network a viable, commercial business.
Sadly, Wave has had to close with the end of the funding, but negotiations are in progress to set up 'Son of Wave' somewhere else in the town, as a community venture.
The equipment is there, so it's just a case of finding premises and volunteer staff. It would be a shame to see a resource like this, which has proved so popular, die for lack of council support.
Hughes and Adgey didn't quite get fibre to the door of their cottage, but have got a broadband aerial and a fast connection. So have lots of others in the town, many of whom no doubt thought it would be years before broadband reached south Devon.
HOW TO APPROACH YOUR OWN PROJECT
- Don't approach it only from the technology end
The accent is on the community. You need to sell the project as an advantage to real people.
- Get as many people involved as possible
If you can find the people in your area who are already interested in broadband, they'll be your best advocates - often much faster and more effective than public meetings.
- Use the power of gossip
Word of mouth is a very effective way to get your message out.
- Consider all possible customers - home, business, educational, local government
Although you may want broadband in your own home, think of all the other people who would find it valuable. Business users will often be able to offset the cost, where individuals can't.
- Make the message clear and simple
Free up your phone line, get permanently-on internet, get faster downloads. Sell the biggest advantages first. In rural areas, most people will only have one phone line and will share it between voice and data. Broadband's speed may not be its biggest attraction - though it's still good to have.
- If you're in a village, tie in with a nearby town
It's easier to extend an existing broadband system from a town to a village than to start from scratch in a village. And if you're in a town, don't forget nearby villages; it's not as expensive as you might think to pull in relatively small pockets of interest, and the extra numbers may take you over a threshold level.
- Try and get an infrastructure provider involved early
Too many people who are interested in playing with the technology get bogged down when they realise somebody has to provide support to subscribers.
See also:
We'd all like to vote, book a hospital appointment and pay our council tax online, but how long before this becomes a reality? 12 Jul 2004
Vested interests of broadband providers are major obstacles to the UK's internet future 21 May 2004
Broadband-enabled teleworking can inject commercial vitality into the remotest rural communities 13 Apr 2004
High-speed internet access for all is slowly becoming a reality, with 3.3 million broadband subscribers and coverage extending to 85 per cent of the UK. But there is still work to be done. 12 Feb 2004All Broadband & ISPs
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