If your town or village has been left out of the fibre broadband rollout, then help could be at hand. Residents of Frilford (population 212, according to the 2001 census) and Frilford Heath in Oxfordshire were snubbed, so teamed up with infrastructure specialist Gigaclear.
Gigaclear has begun installing fibre broadband in both communities, and residents should enjoy 1,000Mbps connectivity starting in April. That's right, 1,000Mbps. That's around 10 times as fast as the best offerings from other providers, and the same speed as the highly publicised Google Fiber experiment in Kansas. All in rural Oxfordshire.
Bruce Ballard, managing director of local business Paddock IT Solutions, said, "We use ADSL over copper at the moment but with so much upstream traffic it performs badly. We've also found our existing service provider's attitude to outages unacceptable. Until now, suitable alternatives have been either unavailable in the area or prohibitively expensive."
Locals will have to shell out £195 for the privilege. But it seems a small price to pay for world-quality broadband.
If you fancy getting your community involved with Gigaclear, it needs to comprise at least 400 properties, and 30 per cent of residents have to sign up.
Frilford isn't the only rural area getting super-speed broadband. Recently, the BBC brought us news of Arkholme in Lancashire, where residents took matters into their own hands and installed their own 500Mbps network. Though they had help from B4RN, an organisation set up to help roll out broadband to the rural north. Residents of Arkholme even dug channels across fields and laid the fibre optic cables themselves.
Companies like BT estimate the cost of hooking up one rural home to be around £10,000, while B4RN reckons it can get that down to £1,000.
It just goes to show, if you've been snubbed by the main rollout, all is not lost. Do you live in a rural area? Have you been left wanting when it comes to broadband? Let me know in the comments, or on Facebook.
Android App 
RSS Feeds 
iPhone App 
Newsletters 
Comments 8
Add your comment
anonymous 28 February, 2013 14:31
Yeah it's £195 a month plus £100 installation fee if you dont do it yourself. As if the average person on an average salary can afford that.
anonymous 28 February, 2013 16:38
Its not that bad if you chip in with your neighbours and setup a wireless service to share it among 4 or 5 of you
anonymous 1 March, 2013 00:10
The 10 meg symmetrical service is £37per month. It can burst up to 1Gbps
anonymous 1 March, 2013 10:07
It's a great initiative for people forgotten by BT and VirginMedia. More communities and Parishes should push through these projects. Eventually costs will come down as more people sign up and technologies become cheaper to install.
anonymous 1 March, 2013 16:00
Living in Bradfield, Berks, we tried getting a satellite connection but have too many trees around us.
Currently trying 'Bonded ADSL' i.e. installing a second phone line. Installation costs £150 (when BT manage to get here, they have so far failed 6 times in 4 months) then £90/month hire from our ISP Eclipse. This will certainly increase reliability and speed, but nothing like as much as 1Gbps described.
anonymous 1 March, 2013 16:34
The whole thing should be wireless
anonymous 6 March, 2013 15:51
Couple of misconceptions about B4RN in the article, it would seem. Firstly, Arkholme is one of the 8 parishes in the B4RN area. B4RN was set up by the community of those 8 parishes to offer gigabit (1000Mbps) services to every property within the community. Secondly, Arkholme, Quernmore, Wray, etc will all get gigabit not 500Mbps.
On a final note to anon, wireless is one of the solutions available; it is not THE solution or those of who have tried to build wireless networks across the world would have cracked rural areas a decade ago! Wireless has many pitfalls and when compared to fibre deployment, maintenance, upgrading etc, the business model is less sustainable than fibre to the home. Even in rural areas.
However, FiWi (fibre to wireless) is a great solution in certain areas where a fibre dig proves prohibitive, either technically or economically eg why dig under a river when you can do a wireless hop for a fraction of the price and without involving the Environment Agency?!
anonymous 13 March, 2013 16:20
I am live on this service now and can confirm the speeds are stunning. 925Mb down, 890Mb up with a 12ms ping time (speed test server in Amsterdam so probably some latency, no speedtest server in the UK fast enough yet!). If the link posts, here is the speedtest result: http://www.speedtest.net/result/2570705763.png Nice job Gigaclear. In addition unlike some providers, the installers arrived on time and had the service up in a few hours, even after digging the trenches and feeding the fibre to the 3rd floor! Recommend getting your neighbours together and approaching them.