Internet access with no weak links

 
Image (c) Broadband for the Rural North, via their Flickr site here

Last week I went into PC World to buy some ethernet cables. The reception from our Virgin wireless hub has been patchy ever since we moved into our interim rented home in readiness for our move to Forge Bank, and I reckoned that by cabling up every device that I could I might improve matters. The young man I approached for advice asked me where I lived. "In Oxford," I said. "Oh," he said, "in that case you'll be fine with the cheaper ones." I ended up buying the more expensive ones. Here's why.

At Lancaster Cohousing we are making sure that all of our homes are ready for fibre-based internet services. Using optical fibre means that bandwidth is ultimately limited only by the speed of light. However, for this to happen, the fibre has to be run right up to your home (FTTH). None of the major providers (BT, Virgin et al) are offering this to consumers. The best they offer is running fibre to a nearby cabinet (FTTC), and then using conventional cable for the last leg to each home.

If that's what we end up with then I probably should have bought the cheaper cables. Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a network's bandwidth is only as wide as the cable with the narrowest bandwidth. And in the FTTC model, that cable is the one that runs from the cabinet to your home.



But we're hoping for something a lot better, thanks to an amazing grassroots internet initative called Broadband for the Rural North (B4RN). This is a community-owned organisation that is mobilising the hole-digging skills and tools already in abundance in rural areas and topping them up with the additional know how needed to lay fibre cable (see video above). Over the summer they will be laying cable just the other side of the river from us, on their way up to far more remote locations, and they have said that they are happy to run a spur off to hook us up too.

Thanks to B4RN our hope is that by the time we are all moved in we will have a fibre to the home internet service ready for us to use, delivering an internet service whose bandwidth is measured in not in megabits but gigabits per second.

There's more. We know that not everybody in our community will want such fast internet services. So we are installing our own fibre network between our offices-to-be in the Mill and our homes. B4RN will connect as far as the Mill, providing as many connections as we want. We will then share these connections out to each of our homes and the Mill offices, enabling some to have a dedicated connection and others to share between two or more homes at a correspondingly lower price per home. We can do this because we are cohousers and sharing with each other is what we are all about.

There's even more. Current convention is that we use wireless routers to distribute the internet through the home. But while wireless internet is great for convenience it is both lower bandwidth and less reliable than cabled. So to enable our superfast broadband to be enjoyed throughout the home, each comes with a ready to use cable network. And the cables used? They're CAT6E, the same as I bought from PC World. This means that if all goes to plan I will be able to get gigabit speed internet by connecting my new cables to any of the network access points in my home.

The biggest risk to our plans is that B4RN fails for lack of sufficient investment. Many of our residents have already bought shares in B4RN, and I urge anyone who believes in the transformative power of grassroots innovation to do so too.

Miles
www.lancastercohousing.org.uk