Cumbria Town Bands Together For Fibre Rollout

Residents in Alston Moor in Cumbria are digging their own trenches in order to ensure their Parish enjoys superfast speeds promised by fibre.

The fibre rollout in this remote region is being organised by social enterprise company by the name of Cybermoor. “Cybermoor is a company with social objectives connecting local people to broadband services, and keeping pace with technology that you see in more densely populated areas,” explained Daniel Heery, chief executive of Cybermoor, speaking to eWEEK Europe UK.

“Cybermoor was started in 2001, when we had no service from BT, as they decided back then that the service to this rural area was not viable,” said Heery. “So in 2002 we built our own wireless network, which currently offers local residents speeds of up to 512Kbit/s. However this network is creaking a bit now, and so we are upgrading it with a combination of fibre and wireless.”

“You can now get ADSL in our region from BT, but because it is a rural service it degrades quickly outside the main town,” Heery explained.

The Alston Moor parish covers 25 square miles and has a population of 2,500, half of which resides in the main town, whilst the others are apparently scattered across different villages and hamlets.

“Everyone’s reliance on the Internet has increased,” said Heery. “As we are owned by the local community, it is important for us to deliver best service we can for them.”

The government’s Digital Britain initiative is intended to deliver fast broadband to everyone, partly funded by a  £6 a year broadband levy, but BT’s fibre network roll-out has been criticised and rural areas are expected to rely on a mixture of wireless coverage and community backed ventures such as this.

“Part of the funding for this project has come from NHS,” said Herry, “mostly because of its huge interest in reducing the cost of looking after people with long-term illness from home. The remaining funding comes from the local community, and Cybermoor always reinvests any profits we make into upgrading the network.”

Despite the flooding disaster in nearby Cockermouth, Heery said their local network has a lot of resilience built into it, thanks to the use of local suppliers for most of its equipment.

According to Herry, the project will be a mixture of fibre to wireless access points, as well as fibre to the home for some properties. “The next phase of the project is to identify the cost of connecting other parts of community. We have already upgraded our wireless access points.”

“The cost of doing over this over the BT network was prohibitively expensive, so we are working on a point-to-point microwave link from Newcastle, with a link from Telewest,” said Herry. “We are therefore able to buy much more bandwidth at a lower cost than from standard ISPs. BT Openreach has a standard set of charges because of where we are in relation to other POPs.”

Herry said that residents should be able to enjoy speeds of up to 20MBit/s from the Telewest microwave link, although he can see this rising to 100Mbit/s in the future. “We are currently in the hands of the planners at the moment, as we need a large masting in Alston, so we are currently aiming to get something in by the end of January.”

Meanwhile, digging the trenches for the fibre links continues. Other areas are also doing similar rollouts.