A VOTE FOR SOUTH LAKELAND AND CUMBRIA SUPPORT YOUR DIGITAL HERO

TALK TALK DIGITAL HEROES AWARDS 2012

NORTH WEST REGION FINALIST – JOHN COLTON

TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, FIBRE GARDEN

Resident of Garsdale, Cumbria and Fibre Garden’s Technical Director, John Colton has been nominated as North West Region Finalist for the Talk Talk Digital Heroes Awards 2012.

Talk Talk, in association with Citizens Online and the Mirror Newspaper Group, for the fifth year running have sponsored the Awards celebrating inspirational people who use digital technology to benefit their community. The winner is decided by a public vote with an awards ceremony at the House of Commons in London.

Voting for the winner has now opened and South Lakeland and Cumbrian residents are encouraged to support your local “Digital Hero”. The relevant website to voteis here

ACT QUICKLY - VOTING CLOSES 18^th November 2012
Full Press release here...

News from Tim Farron MP

MP URGES SOUTH LAKELAND TO VOTE FOR ‘DIGITAL HERO’ JOHN COLTON

South Lakes MP Tim Farron has called on local residents to help him make local resident John Colton Talk Talk’s Digital Hero for 2012.

John is a Founding Member and Technical Director of Fibre Garden, a community broadband company managed by volunteers that was established two years ago to develop a superfast broadband network in the rural communities of Garsdale and Dentdale in South Cumbria.

Recently the Secretary of State for Environment and Rural Affairs visited Garsdale to announce that the community is one of the first two to get an agreement-in-principle for a Rural Community Broadband Fund grant. Pending some conditions being filled by the community-led project, 525 premises will be connected to superfast broadband following a Government investment of £157,500.

John's colleagues at FibreGarden say: "John's passion and leadership have been critical in developing the founding principles of a digital network with 100% inclusivity, fully future proofed, and under community ownership. John has worked selflessly with other communities in Cumbria to help explain the benefits of FTTH, producing the business and technical models to support the company's plans and tirelessly attending hours of community meetings and suppliers discussions to ensure the best possible outcomes."

Tim said: “The Digital Heroes Awards were designed to recognise and reward those who use digital technology to make a difference in their communities. John is the person who best exemplifies that. Having worked with him and others on the broadband scheme I know he is a worthy winner – please support him and help give a local person the national recognition they deserve.”

You can vote by clicking the link: http://www.talktalk.co.uk/digitalheroes/region.php?region=north_west

Our Neighbours

Members of the Fibre Garden Board met with some of our surrounding communities on Saturday to discuss possible options of working together to look at the expansion of the Fibre to the Home Broadband network. Jock Carins chaired the meeting held at Lucid Optical Services in Garsdale.

A presentation was given outlining the Fibre Garden project and how this can be expanded through collaborative working. Individual follow up meetings with representatives from each community are expected later this month.

UK Needs Fibre to the Home

This is an interesting article on the case for Fibre to the Home, worth a read.

Start Voting

The TalkTalk Digital Heroes Awards are now open for voting! Follow this link to make your vote for our very own John Colton who is a very deserving candidate.

Please spend a couple of minutes to vote!!

Our Neighbours

Members of the Fibre GarDen team are meeting with a number of neighbouring communities on Saturday to:

• Provide an outline of the project
• Explain the product
• How to make it happen
• What are the technical issues?
• How to finance
• What are the operational issues?
• How can we and what are the benefits of working together?

We are looking forward to a productive meeting that could be the start of some long and fruitful business and community relationships.

Fibre Garden Board Meets

The Fibre Garden Board will meet later this week to address a number of pressing issues that will see the project progress further.

Some of the key points are reviewing the legal structure, to ensure it's robust and conforms to all current legislation to permit the rasing of funds through a share issue and the expansion of the network to neighbouring communities.

There is much work continuing in the background to drive this project forward.

Dr Peter Cochrane for NextGen TV

Dr Peter Cochrane talks about his presentation at the Next Gen Conference, the bigger picture and doing things in a new and different way. 

NextGen 12 conference in Westminster

Conference Report by John Colton:

The two days of talks and debate about future broadband kicked-off with a typically lively presentation by Peter Cochrane, ex-CTO of BT, which highlighted the way the world is changing due to technology and how we will have to think and work in different ways. Information and the communication of information will be key to this and our future success as a country. Peter pointed out that objectors suggest that there is no proven demand for future services, but this is always the case with anything new. For this new vision we need fast broadband, 1 Gb/s both upstream and down, hence symmetrical. Peter also pointed out that nothing else provides what optical fibre can do, and that if we don’t stop talking and get on and build the [FTTP] networks “then frustration will rapidly migrate to full economic disadvantage and disablement”.

By contrast, later in the day Liv Garfield, CEO Openreach (BT’s access network arm), suggested that in their labs they had not been able to replicate a situation where a typical family could not do everything they needed to do with just 24 Mb/s. Additionally she felt the demand was all downstream with upstream being significantly less important. Liv did however qualify this by acknowledging that future needs would almost certainly require higher speeds and so we should absolutely plan to install for higher speeds. There was also an acknowledgement from Liv that BT’s main rollout of FTTC technology will not work well in rural areas, not something an admission I’d ever heard from BT before.

These views are in some ways poles apart, and they are in some ways matched by the views of delegates at the event with all acknowledging that we will all need FTTP, but some feeling that FTTC is a step on the journey whilst others feel the slower FTTC shows a lack of ambition and invariably delays the inevitable FTTP. The economics and cost arguments are paramount, but seem to take little account of the future.

To just pick out here two talks is unfair to other presentations which were good and interesting, but to save time (for me and the reader) I will just list some soundbites:

• Digital inclusion is important and the digital divide is in some ways growing.
• Engaging with the digital world will be important to all people and professions with farmers and other traditionally non-digital technology industries highlighted. 
• The digital divide is in both infrastructure and user/population engagement. 
• Some feel the population engagement is key as it drives demand – they feel the infrastructure is getting the attention “there’s no point in building motorways if most people can’t drive cars”.
• There was no real disagreement - most felt we should do more to encourage those who have not engaged with computers or the digital world, but equally it holds true that people won’t learn to drive if there are no roads to drive on. 
• In Sweden they believe in ‘open networks’ which is quite different from ‘open access’ and effectively means that each company uses each others infrastructure and saves on duplication of build costs. This leads to reduced costs, increased competition and hence choice and lower prices for the customers. One Swedish service provider pointed out that although they sell direct to consumers 80% of their income is from their competitors renting dark fibre from them. 
• The Swedish delegates pointed out that they felt the economic argument was over- played in the UK. They said that in the future everything would be connected and the infrastructure was for society so just needed to be built. 
• In Sweden customers are now more concerned by broadband outages than power cuts! 
• Some interesting statistics on use of mobile devices.
• Now more than 81 million mobiles phones registered in the UK compared with less than 10 million in 1997 (15 years ago).
• 51% of mobile phones are now ‘smart phones’ with huge computing power.
• now more calls on mobile phones than land-lines.
• 90% of more mobile tablet PC use is in the home.
• telephone call traffic is reducing slightly.
• biggest growth is in data usage – predictions of huge increases in mobile date use in the next few years.
• 4G mobile masts will replace 3G, but by upgrade first 
•  new masts in rural areas are very difficult.
• low population density makes economics difficult:
• installed to ‘fill-in’ or maintain service coverage
• backhaul in rural areas is expensive to build
• electrical supply in rural areas also often has large civils cost

Lord Inglewood who is the chair of the House of Lords Communications Committee gave a presentation on the report they had produced on broadband in the UK and the government’s approach. This was well received, but with some criticism from some quarters. Fibre GarDen contributed evidence to the committee, and when I met Lord Inglewood at the event he was familiar with our project and appeared keen to take me up on an offer to visit us and see our group. Both Andrew and Stefan from fibre GarDen were names instantly suggested by Lord Inglewood and his clerk as being involved with our project, suggesting that our contributions were perhaps even more prominent than we had previously known.

Aside from the techy discussions on speeds and the economics questions, it is apparent that digital exclusion and the problems it will cause is a very hot topic now. In my view however the solutions so far put forward are constrained by the dire financial situation we are in and will therefore do little to address the issues. On speaker asked council representatives how they would help to get people online and engaged with the digital world – did they have a plan? To me this is another area where it is not councils who will take the lead, although they may have a role to play, it is the wider community with all of us helping and encouraging neighbours, but until we build the infrastructure in rural areas it will be hard to get our neighbours excited about something they can’t use at home!

FTTH Council Europe cheers Spain, scolds the UK

October 10, 2012

Author Pauline Rigby

In the latest update to the Fiber to the Home Council’s FTTH ranking, Spain is one of the fastest growing fiber nations in Europe while the UK is the slowest. The FTTH Council Europe offered a preview of its official data at the NextGen 12 conference in London ahead of the official announcement next week.

Spain is one of two new countries to join the European FTTH ranking this time around, the other being Luxembourg. That brings the total number of countries in Europe with more than 1% of households subscribing directly to fiber connections to 22 out of a possible 39 (the ranking also includes Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS).

Overall there are now about 5.95 million FTTH subscribers in the EU35 countries and the study also counted a further 6.3 million in the CIS region. This corresponds to a modest increase of about 16% in the number of subscribers connected across the EU35 during the first six months of 2012.

To put this into context, the Asia Pacific region had 58 million FTTH subscribers at the end of June 2012, while the FTTH Council North America recently announced that the number of FTTH subscribers on that continent had passed 9 million (see “FTTH Council Americas releases FTTH market numbers”). Europe is still a minor actor on the world stage when it comes to FTTH.

Read the full article...

Rural Broadband Get Green Light from EU

The UK's rural rollout of fast broadband has been given a boost as the EU competition commissioner approved the state-funded scheme.

Read the full BBC article...

Fibre GarDen is through to the final of the TalkTalk Digital Heroes awards! Our Technical Director, John Colton, is the nominated person and has now been asked for some PR pictures and quotation.

You will will shortly be able to start voting for him!

FibreGarden will be represented at this years NextGen 12 Conference by John Colton, our Technical Director. 

This will be the third year of attendance and it provides a good opportunity to catch up on some of the latest thinking and to network with other community representatives and potential suppliers. John will be reporting from the Conference and you can catch up with his comments here!

Digital Heroes Update

We have submitted our application to TalkTalk Digital Heroes prompted and nominated by Tim Farron MP, you will soon be able to vote to support us.

Application submitted:

There are three key questions on the form to be answered as follows:

• Provide a description of the Group, its objectives, mission statement, history and how it has developed

Fibre GarDen is a community company established to deliver a fully inclusive future-proofed fibre to the home (FTTH) broadband network in Garsdale and Dentdale, two dales located in South-East Cumbria, close to the North Yorkshire and Lancashire boundaries and inside the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

This has been a joint endeavour as we recognized early on that combining our resources and efforts would be beneficial to the residents and businesses of both dales. It has the approval and support of both Parish Councils and the not for profit community broadband company has been established with a strong volunteer management team with combined experience in finance, marketing, fibre optic technology, education, health provision, and farming services.

The project is ambitious, as its aim is not simply to increase rural broadband speeds, but to demonstrate how economic disadvantage and social exclusion can be overcome in a rural area by the provision of future-proof Next Generation Access (NGA) broadband. In order to achieve its goals, it will harness community support and action alongside government investment and commercial partnership.

The volunteer management team has now been working nearly two years with DEFRA, Broadband UK (BDUK), Cumbria County Council and Tim Farron MP to achieve the key first funding from the government as a foundation stone to enable this project.

• Provide a description of the project, new or existing, what is it hoping to achieve, how many people affected, evidence of success to date, how it fits in with what the charity as a whole is working towards

A detailed business plan has been developed which informs that a 60km FTTH network connecting the two dales and 500+ premises will be constructed with a community organisational and digging effort and farmers’ community spirit. This is fully costed to a high technical standard including network installation, fibre cabling and fibre types, installation and fusion splicing, telephony, quality of service, infrastructure services and ongoing management thereof.

The network that is created will provide a 100% fibre optic cable to all properties and businesses, and thus be fully future-proofed; enable initial broadband speeds of  40Mbps and 100 Mbps, with the option for Gb/s service in the future depending upon need and growth in demand, thereby enabling enabling the most advanced business, education, media, healthcare, tourism and agricultural usage and applications in a rural setting.

Success to date includes active engagement with our community through meetings, a regular blogspot with positive feedback, an initial intention by over 60% of our premises to take up the service and indication of an investment amount in excess of £200,000 that can be raised from individuals within the community through a community share issue to finance the project. Furthermore on the 12th September the Secretary of State, The Rt. Hon. Owen Paterson MP visited Garsdale to announce that Fibre Garden would be the first Rural Broadband Pilot in Cumbria to receive a £157,500 grant under the Rural Development Programme for England (RDPE) scheme. 

We have also received recognition from Cumbria County Council and BDUK as follows:

“Cumbria County Council regards fibre GarDen CIC’s planned FTTP local network as an important part of the overall broadband strategy for Cumbria. The significant efforts of fibre GarDen CIC have been instrumental in achieving the best possible outcome for the pan-County rollout and the successful construction of their network will be a valuable contribution to the provision of superfast broadband in the county”

Alan Cook, Project Manager, Cumbria County Council

"Fibre GarDen’s help in exploring ways in which communities can actively support suppliers to deliver superfast broadband access to deeply rural areas has been extremely useful in helping us develop a number of potential products for communities in similar locations across the country to utilize”

Robert Sullivan , Chief Executive, Broadband Delivery UK

This is significant as Cumbria is a location where 18% of properties do not have access to at least 2Mbps broadband at present, reflecting the rural nature of much of the County. 

For us it means an end to rural digital poverty, the opportunity to revitalise our communities, and the most exciting and ambitious infrastructure project since the construction of the railways 150 years ago transformed national communications for our dales. 

Furthermore the effect will not be limited to the 500 premises that will be served by this initial network as we are already reaching out to surrounding communities who have expressed an interest to join us in this endeavour and extend our community network to their areas. In addition the project will have the potential to impact upon the 20,000 people who live and work in the Yorkshire Dales National Park and the over 8 million tourists that visit every year.   

• Why do they deserve it? What great work have they done, what evidence is there in their impact, what else can be achieved if they get the £5,000 grant

John Colton, Technical Director of Fibre Garden has been the driving force on the project since its inception and critical in bringing together our two dales. He is widely acknowledged as one of the UK's leading experts on fibre optic technology and runs a training centre in Garsdale that includes instruction given to telecommunications companies from the UK and internationally.

He has that unique ability to translate potentially complex matters into simple to understand messages that can be readily taken forward by other culture carriers into the community. His modesty, self effacing nature and good humour have all been critical aspects of the success to date in keeping the whole volunteer team on course to achieve success. He has worked for several thousands of hours on the business model and technical features of our project, cajoling and encouraging suppliers to offer us the best deals on equipment. 

He was instrumental in encouraging the consideration and current evaluation of our innovative possible backhaul solution, provided by Network Rail Telecoms via fibre optic cable along the Settle- Carlisle railway line. If this pilot is adopted, and successful, this will provide a blueprint for rural communities across the nation. His passion and conviction is second to none and must be recognised by your judges not just in a regional context, but also a national one. He will apply the grant to furthering the objectives of our project and in particular helping to explain to those less advantaged about how a FTTH service will transform their lives in the future.

The Telegraph

Fast broadband more important to house buyers than parking

Homebuyers now rank a fast broadband connection above off-street parking and local amenities when considering a new property, a poll reveals. Read the full article

Also see this article from Uswitch