Rural broadband speeds

And that's the crux of the proble. It was costing us £200+ to do each install and the punters would not pay that. You need people with insurance and ladders - specially if you're going to drill into peoples houses. We used local sky installers and they weren't cheap. Do it yourself, crack some external render/plasterwork and you've suddenly got something more to wory about than just putting a cable through the wall...

And one p2p'er will kill the lot.

We got just over 100 people (out of 1800 houses) to put their names on a bit of paper in one town. This was after running an 18-month funded project to raise awareness and research the effects of broadband in a rural community. Then barely 50 committed to the install of £99, which was less than half what it was really costing. Our first customers cheque bounced on us. Then trying to get £25 a month out of them was like pulling swords out of stone )-:

On paper, 50 customers at £25 looks good, but the running costs (without staff) were close to £1000 a month - to buy the backhaul, pay for space on the masts and farmers, etc.)

Do yourself a favour and don't do it.

You don't need woks - I recently did help a friend in Wales as it happens, to get a link to his neighbour about a mile away - good line of sight at roof-top level using older, but good outdoor kit with flat-plate antennae. (smartBridges kit)

The longest wi-fi link we ran was 6.5 miles in Cornwall using a standard

12db omni at the access point and and an 18db grid parabolic antennae at the client end. Good line of sight though - client was uphill from the base.

Gordon

Reply to
Gordon Henderson
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IIRC our backhaul (5Mbps symmetrical with allowed bursts to 10Mbps no useage limits) costs 10k+/year for 300 customers. =A333/year/customer or= two months subs at our top rate. Trouble is most of our subs are at =A38/mon= th not =A318. After the backhaul cost there is about =A330k to pay for the = full time admin and network maintenace staff (one of each) plus network maintenance and all the other on going costs like site/office rental, power, marketing, not forgetting a sinking fund to upgrade/replace the network infrastructure after say 5 years. Though with fibre that might n= ot be so pressing, our network is now 6/7 years old based on WiFi and is creaking both from increased traffic levels and equipment failure due to= age.

Of course if you have people volunteer to do the admin/network maintenan= ce for free from home that helps an awful lot but possibly with quite an impact if the network dies and your volunteer is busy doing their paid d= ay job.

The chances are you would get grant funding for the capital outlay associated with digging holes, installing servers, and possibly the firs= t

12 months backhaul costs. What you won't get funding for is all those ongoing costs, like the backhaul after the 1st 12 months...

Yes, a "village ISP" is viable, there are plenty of places with such sel= f help systems in place but the economics can be a bit border line.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

If jointing the fibre no, that is a skilled and time consuming process. If the lenghts aren't particulary long it's probably easier to blow the old ones out and new ones in.

DTH needs one fibre cable per home/end point back to a "hub". Another way of distributing the connections is fibre to "good site(s)" then wireless as the final link. You can get reliable wireless stuff these days that doesn't use 2.5GHz (WiFi and loads of other stuff) and will give speeds to a few tens of Mbps over decent distances. Personally I'd want to put in DTH fibre with development grant support.

Find suitable places with mains, install your kit there, give the owners a free connection as payment.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

But you'd need to provide the arms and legs of all your customers to pay for it. Anyway I don't think BT would do it. If they are going to fibre an area why do it for some one else when they could do it for themselves and get the income from that work.

You do it, own the network and sell capacity to content providers.

I don't think I know there is money available. What I think is that there is going to be even more money available in the not too distant future.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Yep, when we put our network in there was no bandwidth or useage limit. One or two people then started to hog the bandwidth and effectively denying everyone else access to the internet. We had to introduce a scale of tarrifs with different bandwidth limits, still true unlimited useage though.

We have several backbone links of that length and a couple considerably longer. 24" dishes each end for the long hops, yagis in tubes for shorter ones.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

That depends on the distrubution of the population in relation to the telephone exchange. If there are a lot of people more than say 3 miles from the exchange and/or the local copper(ali...) is crap then ADSL is going to be slow and at the mercy of BT Openreach fixing it (residential= line, two, three, 5 days?).

Spherical objects. We have many AP to end user hops well over a mile. Yo= u do need line of sight though, which for places with trees can be a problem. Few trees up here...

Not impossible.

Agreed, our WiFi based network was fine when it was installed but now do= wn in the town with the plorification of home WiFi LANs the air space is

*very* crowded. We offer a cheap "set up your wireless LAN" service to t= ry an mitigate some of the problems by shifting private LANs to different channels to reduce mutal interference problems.

Network congestion hasn't been to much of an issue until recently and th= en only on some links, users are bandwidth limited though.

Which will probably be provided on fibre so why mess about with 2Mbps go= for the 1Gbps. B-)

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

I think we are slightly at cross purposes.

What I had in mind ws that BT would install a load of one to many fibre repeaters/multiplexers in street cabinets fed with power from the exchange.

The a single fiber from the street cab to the home.

And probably some sort of video caching kit in each exchange. So that downloading videos was real time.

wots DTH?

Till that mains goes..

Nope. For resilience it all has to be fed from the exchanges.

I cant see a better solution than using BT streetboxes as fibre fed exchange powered concentrators.

Even if you still had copper to the home, you should be able to get about 20Mbps over a 100m or so. With rewire with cat 5, 100Mbps.

That is what needs to be done realistically: Upgrade each exchange for more bandwidth, then start pushing the fibre further towards the customer on a case by case basis.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Why not get a 512K or 1M product? Then you won't be paying the same as people who get 4-8M.

Reply to
Mark

I used to when on dialup, but a lot of pages dont render acceptably if you do that today. Plus pictures do have their use!

NT

Reply to
meow2222

Often not there for multipage results. It turns a simple task into a monumental waste of time.

Toolstation site is even worse, for other more basic reasons. Why dont these sizeable businesses realise theyre screwing up on basic stuff and losing sales.

NT

Reply to
meow2222

(snipped)

Thats the cause, but any web designer with a clue should try their site on the connections users actually use - which includes 56k. Failure to do so is incompetent.

NT

Reply to
meow2222

I didn't get asked when they chose to use aluminium instead of copper to our local exchange. The cost of _replacing_ it is high; the cost of doing it right in the first place would not have been.

Andy

Reply to
Andy Champ

Oh there's an idea I can use lossy compression on those jpeg images on the web server. Oh hang on...

Andy

Reply to
Andy Champ

I thought the reason they DID use copper (in the 70's?) was because copper prices HAD gone through the roof?

Reply to
Andy Burns

They didn't know that at the time.

Much of Milton Keynes was wired with aluminium, and this apparently restricts broadband speeds quite severely.

Reply to
Bruce

^^^^^^ aluminium obviously

Reply to
Andy Burns

Right-sizing them does help, though. Many web servers still have huge images displayed as a 100x100 thumbnail on the web page.

Reply to
PCPaul

Yes I thought about that. There seem to be very few 1Mb offerings and these are at the same price as my 'up to 8'. Unless you know better...

Reply to
Peter Scott

That would only take about 3 minutes on my ADSL link. 8-)

Reply to
dennis
8<

His whinge is in the same class as the idiots that buy houses on flood planes and then demand a flood control scheme at great expense to everyone else who wouldn't have bought a hose that floods in the first place.

All his letter says is "It costs more to supply broadband to me but its slower and I want a bigger subsidy and sod the others".

Reply to
dennis

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