
A British village that built one of the UK’s fastest internet networks - pujjad
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/the-remote-british-village-that-built-one-of-the-uks-fastest-internet-networks/
======
throw0101a
A few years ago _Ars_ also had a good article on Ammon, Idaho, which build an
open-access municipal fibre infrastructure that ISPs offer services on:

* [https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-...](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-if-switching-fiber-isps-was-as-easy-as-clicking-a-mouse/)

The embedded video is a good intro on muni-fibre:

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSQVvFY4lPI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSQVvFY4lPI)

Personally I think that's how all Internet connectivity should be done: the
OIS Level 1/2 stuff is run either by the government, or at least a non-profit,
and the IP connectivity is handle by the private sector.

~~~
walrus01
A number of the county owned public utility districts in Washington state have
done exactly that, osi layer 1 and 2 run by the county. Individual ISPs
establish NNIs with the county at a core network locations and offer layer 3
(and billing, customer end user support, other value added services).

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hogFeast
It is also funny to look at a map of network speeds in the UK. Everywhere is
slow apart from Hull (a relatively gritty fishing town in the North East).
This is the only place where the local telephone company wasn't taken over by
BT, and was the first city to have full fibre.

I understand that it is hard to provide fast internet to some parts of the
UK...but most of England, where most people live, is fairly densely
populated...this shouldn't be hard. The solution isn't for people to do this
themselves, that reverses common sense (how can it be cheaper for some guy to
just dig a cable themselves? it makes no sense). It is for the people who
should be doing this to just do their job properly (BT have done pretty much
everything to make themselves look bad, it is unreal...for some reason people
still think Gavin Patterson is a legend rather than a gaffe-prone moron).

~~~
tialaramex
96% of households in the UK can get 30 Mbps.

Now, some people do lots of hand waving at this point. Surely, they argue, if
everybody had gigabit networking instead of just 30 Mbps we'd find some
exciting new application to justify it? Nope. Some communities do have this
and they don't invent new applications it mostly sits idle.

The other fun thing that people say here is "Well but they don't". That's
true, they _can_ get 30 Mbps but they choose slightly cheaper offerings that
are much lower speed. So why are you desperate to deploy higher bandwidth
offerings? If your company finds that take-up of new 30 litre per second water
supplies isn't what you hoped for, do you conclude people must need 30 cubic
metres per second of water instead and deploy bigger high pressure pipes? Or
do you say "Wait a minute, maybe people actually have enough water?"

~~~
dijit
> 96% of households in the UK can get 30 Mbps.

96% may have 30Mbps advertised to them, but I would venture the question: do
they actually get that?

When I lived in London, I lived in Lewisham, Bromley-by-Bow and Whitechapel; I
had shockingly bad internet in each of these places.

I very commonly got less than 0.5Mbps ( for example:
[https://www.speedtest.net/my-
result/i/757179610](https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/757179610) )

That didn't stop BT from selling me 16Mb/s.

~~~
tialaramex
They don't get it because they aren't buying it. But yes, 30Mbps is what you'd
expect to get at those 96% of households if you bought whichever of the
mainstream services offers >30Mbps

That might be a VDSL product from any of the popular ISPs (if you live with a
few hundred metres of a "green box"), a cable product if you live in one of
the cities or larger towns that have cable, or dedicated fibre link.

Some people see significantly worse performance because of their own
suboptimal choices (e.g. maybe the blinking lights on the supplied VDSL modem
annoy you so you run a telephone extension to a different room and lose 4Mbps
of bandwidth because crappy telephone extensions don't do high bandwidth
networking very well) and over a population of millions some will see physical
network problems, that may need repair before they see the intended
performance. But on the whole this 30Mbps coverage figure is based on
extrapolating measurements from real users over data about available service.

I'm not aware of any 16MB/s products (16MB/s = 128Mbps or maybe you just meant
16Mbps) but Lewisham, which you gave as an example, has VDSL available at all
the consumer nodes, so unless you lived in the £5M penthouse of some mixed use
building in Docklands you _could_ have bought faster networking you just
didn't.

It can seem like surely if they could offer 30Mbps VDSL, why is my ADSL only
1Mbps? But that's misunderstanding the technology. ADSL was deployed in the UK
to exchanges, so the signal needs to get from your home to an actual telephone
exchange, there's probably one in your borough but it might be well over a
mile away. However VDSL is in street cabinets, so your signal only travels to
the cabinet which might be only a few hundred metres away. This makes it
somewhat more expensive but also a lot faster. Unless (in both cases) you
don't buy it.

~~~
dijit
>I'm not aware of any 16MB/s products (16MB/s = 128Mbps or maybe you just
meant 16Mbps) but Lewisham, which you gave as an example, has VDSL available
at all the consumer nodes, so unless you lived in the £5M penthouse of some
mixed use building in Docklands you could have bought faster networking you
just didn't.

Incorrect, BT could charge me more but by their own admission they would not
be able to deliver the speed.

\- FWIW this was eventually resolved in Bromley-by-Bow because the fibre laid
by telecity for the olympics was sold to Hyperoptic.

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iwaslensis
My Partners family were one of the originals on this (and live just outside
the village). It has to be said that it is by far the best broadband I have
experienced - even when compared to corporate internet that I work with

~~~
kmlx
i'm curios about the speed. i live in London and use Hyperoptic with the
1000mbps up and down subscription (and according to my ubiquiti, the speeds
are real).

~~~
iwaslensis
In the tests I’ve done they’re achieving in the range of 700 up/down, for them
though the big selling point has been the reliability - I can speak from
experience (living on a farm myself) that sure the speed isn’t great, maybe in
the high teens to low twenties, but the annoying thing is the constant
dropouts

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jonwinstanley
Great to see this story on HN, I have been at a home which was connected to
B4RN and got 105mb down/154mb up.

And yes, I kept a note of it for some reason.

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bb123
For clarity, this is not the same Clapham as the area of central London.

~~~
acallaghan
'Village' should be a clue there

~~~
brigandish
Wimbledon Village is in London, not that it's really a village any longer.
Even when lowercased, a denomination such as village isn't going to be a clue
in a city like London with tiny pockets of communities that may have been
there since Boudicca was whispered in the local pubs as a code to drink up.

------
ghyttu
Clapham is not remote at all, however, B4rn does serve more remote areas and
farms. Also the network started in a village called Arkholme and the HQ based
in Melling.

~~~
tialaramex
It's certainly not remote by American standards, but if not for the fact it
has a railway station [that's why Clapham (Yorkshire) is on the drop down list
of things you might have meant when you ask the railway ticketing system for
tickets to Clapham even if you actually meant Clapham Junction the busy
interchange in London] it'd be pretty far from anywhere by English standards.
And that railway station is a good long walk from the actual village of
Clapham anyway.

I went there because they have a very large hole in the ground nearby. A
stream flowing over the hills reached a crack formed presumably by repeating
freezing and thawing, and worked its way down from the brow of one hill to a
river below, over a tremendously long period of time the flowing water has
worn a cathedral-sized hole inside the hill. Twice a year tourists can get
lowered down to see for themselves, cavers set up a proper winch and safety
gear and let idiots like me with no experience wander about and gawp at it for
a fee.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaping_Gill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaping_Gill)

