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Let your neighbours
Broadband4Wroxton
Phone: 01295 731910
Fax: 01295 731912
E-mail: adsl@broadband4wroxton
We’re on the Web! www. broadband4wroxton.
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Keeping you informed This is the seventh of an irregular series of updates from Broadband4Wroxton. Apologies for the lack of information flow but I have been extremely busy of late and have not been sure how far I should raise my head above the parapet. To those who asked to be kept informed, if you no longer wish to receive this email then please mail me at adsl@broadband4wroxton.org.uk More news from BT BT has quietly released the other side of their review in July. 322 exchanges have been deemed “UNVIABLE” This list includes Wroxton and the following in and around Oxfordshire
Having sneaked the above into the database if you put your phone number into http://www.bt.com/broadband/ you now get:
BT also says that they are currently reviewing all exchanges
and will be announcing results in a couple of months. More F.U.D. Oxfordshire County Council I have previously mentioned that SEEDA have provided Oxfordshire County Council some funding; £30,000 for demand aggregation and £50,000 for wireless broadband trials. Both pieces of funding were 2002/2003 budgeted items and were made available in January 2003. In July I was told by SEEDA that OCC had not yet applied for any of it! Eventually following several emails to the leader of the County Council I was informed that they had applied for it, spent a bit of the £30,000 on some consultancy (the consultant phoned all the local campaigners and put a report together based on those conversations) and allocated the balance to three (possibly four) Oxfordshire campaigns for trials. After several months of planning OCC told us at a public meeting (at the end of September) that they had received the contract with SEEDA and the ICT department had passed the baton to the Development Department of the County. The White Horse Broadband group immediately sent in their plan for a pilot. On Wednesday of this week Martin Stott of the County Council informed WHBB that the SEEDA/OCC contract would not be signed and that the funds would not be disbursed as he didn’t have the resource in his department to manage it. At a Community Broadband meeting this afternoon I asked Steve Coppins of SEEDA what the process would be to apply for the funds directly. His answer was that OCC had lost the funding and that now it had been aggregated into their new scheme launched today on seeonline.net. and to ignore OCC! • RDAs have £1.8bn budget in FY 2004/5 which can be applied in part to broadband where there is an identifiable market failure. Oxfordshire Rural Broadband I have also been intimating that something was happening on the wireless front. I and several like minded people have created Oxfordshire Rural Broadband Limited, a not for profit company limited by guarantee, with an aim of providing broadband to those parts of Oxfordshire that BT will not be reaching any time soon. Oxfordshire Rural Broadband, ORB, was created out of the
various broadband action groups around northern Oxfordshire. Its goal is to
bring together the scarce skills, administration capabilities, and sources of
funding to ensure sustainable, viable broadband reaches all of rural
Oxfordshire by the end of 2005. ORB aims to offer managed services to local community
projects run on behalf of and for the benefit of the local community. ORB
aims to assist any like-minded, not-for-profit, local community
organisations. Those communities choosing to use its services will form a board
of governors, controlling its strategy and investment decisions. ORB has adopted a model for predicting demand for
broadband services based on Oftel research, which
is considered by many as an overly cautious predictor of demand. For example,
Oftel predicted that 19% of residential internet
users would convert to broadband in 2003 – at the time of writing, this had
already exceeded 16% with a quarter of the year remaining. The initial area we plan to cover is the corridor between the M40 and the A40. The planning has been done around the West In the next few days there will be a website at www.oxonrb.net I have tried to arrange a meeting with Whilst we have the grand plan, we could possibly do things sooner on a smaller level growing organically if there is sufficient enthusiasm for the service. If there are any businesses out there with a budget to help, please contact me at the address below. All it would take is two or three local businesses who need the service now and we could provide a satellite based service in the short term and order leased lines when we have proved the demand, or when funding is available from the RDA. There will be a public meeting about ORB at Shipton under Wychwood Village Hall on Wednesday 29th October from 20.00 - 22.00. The hall does seat 150 but please do let me know if you will be attending so that we have some idea of numbers. Local Events Various dates, Business Link are hosting a series of events entitled “Realistic, accessible, affordable IT Solutions” this will show how to use broadband once you have it rather than how to get it, ORB and representatives of its cousin, White Horse Broadband, will be speaking at the Oxfordshire events Crown and Cushion Hotel,
Chipping Norton, 28 October Villiers Hotel, Buckingham, 29
October Sudbury House Hotel, Faringdon,
30 October Badgemore Park Golf Club,
Henley-on-Thames, 3 November Whitehill Centre, Chesham, 6
November Spread Eagle Hotel, Thame 12
November Aylesbury Football Club, Aylesbury, 13 November Wilton Hall, Milton Keynes, 18 November Rye Hill Golf Club, Banbury, 19 Novembers Web forum I have created a web based forum for you to discuss the above and provide some community content. http://forums.broadband4wroxton.org.uk/phpBB2/ Whilst I have been testing the forums I have had several ‘male enhance*ment’ companies trying to register and copy the membership list, so I have made the registration both compulsory and moderated. Once you register the system sends me an email and I open the door, once open you get a confirmatory email to access.
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