The conference was organised by the
Access for Broadband Campaign,
lead sponsorship came from Airspan, BT, IBM and SEEDA. Supporting
sponsorship came from Alvarion, Broadband Access Strategies, The DTI,
Broadband Strategy Group, Demon, WFI, Net to Net, Simmonds & Simmonds,
Digital Dales, Replicate, SWEDA, LocustWorld, Zen Internet and Interaxion.
Joe Sonke of the
Radiocommunications Agency gave a brief presentation on the various
frequencies available for wireless communications both unlicensed
(802.11x) and licensed spectra (2.8Ghz etc)
Airspan, IBM and
Alvarion gave
presentations of the product offerings, in the case of Airspan and
Alvarion this was hardware for both 802.11x and the licensed spectrum. The
advantage of these two seemed to be their frequency hopping capabilities.
There followed some
wireless case studies by major organisations,
First Broadband,
Oak BV, Groupe Pathfinder and
The Flax Trust
Apart from First Broadband and the Flax Trust I was unaware of the
technology that the companies were using and some of the radio technology
went over my head, apologies to the speakers.
First Broadband,
Malcolm Matson (ex ceo COLT Telecoms) have put together a small wireless
community using 802.11x technology in Penwith, they are using this as a
pilot and will be rolling the service out to other communities shortly.
The Flax Trust are
putting together a major network in Ireland.
After lunch there was a
"Community Networks Roundtable" with ten minute presentations followed by
a Q&A.
Lindsey Annison of
Digital Dales/Edenfaster outlined what had been achieved with
satellite
in Catterick, her experiment with a
mobile mesh network on a classic coach in Kirkby Steven.
Daniel Heery, project
manager of Alston
Cybermoor outlined what they had achieved with substantial government
funding, They seem to have taken advantage of every piece of funding in
the last three years. They have given computers to everyone who wanted
one, linked them together and given them broadband access for anything
from £5 pm and £35pm depending upon circumstances. They had a problem when
their main backhaul iced up in the winter, a lack of SLA meant they could
not get back online as quickly as they wanted. Alston Cybermoor is an
Industrial and Friendly Society.
Gordon Adgey of
Buckfastleigh
Broadband outlined his project near Dartmoor, again they have obtained
serious funding from government agencies (With £500,000 over two years).
In September, they opened a centre (the Wave) on the village's high
street, utilising the fast connection provided by the South-West Grid for
Learning, a broadband service for schools.
Laurie van Someren, stepped in at the last
minute to give a brief outline of the Cambridge Ring.
[note to myself, if I am going to report on events like this make
better notes!]
BT, Government and RDA representatives then
gave us an expert's panel for "Progressing the Rural and Regional Agenda"
Trish Jones Genral Manager, Regional
Broadband Partnership, gave us lots of statistics about the number of
exchanges, those enabled etc:
Since June last year added 1m users to 2m.
Then there were 1,116 ADSL exchanges (covering 66% population)
Now 1,431 which is 71%
326 exchanges in build
525 have triggers [note 500 extra triggers set the following day, some
wehnt straight into build]
leaves about 3,400 exchanges not to be
activated.
Trish was heavily involved in teh Objective
1 funding project in Cornwall
Nigel Heriz-Smith, the new head of the
DTI's Rural Broadband Unit. He's been in the job six weeks. His remit is
to bring DTI/DEFRA/RDA rural ICT teams together, ensuring there are funds
available. He noted that the UKonline information that he had previously
been responsible for was totally silent on rural issues, he was going to
correct this. He had created his 10 point action plan and was proceeding
to fulfill it. On the actionplan was a toolkit for community broadband,
probably aimed at the Parish Councils.
Steve Coppins of SEEDA announced that in
October there would be a website seeonline.net that was a self help portal
for rural broadband campaigns. The webiste was currently out to tender. He
confirmed SEEDA's policy on State Aid funding in that the EU's de minimus
funding policy was €100,000 over three years per entity. This means that
they can't pay BT but they can pay community companies. They have already
paid £14k to the Blewberry campaign for their Invisible Networks project.
During the round table discussions that
followed Steve Coppins in conjunction with Nigel Heriz-Smith confirmed
that there wer no EU state aid barrier to local authorities allowing
community access to their recently built networks, like the Oxford
Community Network, What was needed was clarity from tyhe various legal
advisors,
There followed two workshop sessions, I
attended the Community Broadband Project one. One gem that came out of
this was that we should all campaign for Broadband to become a "service of
genral economic interest".
The Keynote address was presented by Dr
Peter Cochrane, form CIO of BT and founder of Conceptlabs, I urge you to
look at his website
www.cochrane.org.uk at some point his presentation should be up there,
but there is lots to see/hear and read that is of interetst to anyone,
technologist or techophobe. Again a gem from his speech wifi is a direct
compettitor to the dark fibre we have at the moment, with the rapid
rollout of wifi we could just have to light all the fibre to give us the
required backhaul.
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