Episode: 2365
Title: HPR2365: Rolling out a radio-based internet service in rural England
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2365/hpr2365.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 01:45:58

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This in HPR episode 2,365 entitled Rowling Outer Radio based internet service in Royal England.
It is hosted by Wiener and is about 20 minutes long and currently in a clean flag.
The summary is one person's quest to get a decent internet connection when the big corporation
aren't interested.
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Hello, this is Beezer back on ACA Public Radio after a break of something in the region
of two years.
The very first HBR episode I ever listened to was number 980 back in 2012.
It was about how the residents were a moat part of Lancashire in the North England had
given up all hope that the big telecoms companies would roll out a decent broadband service
to where they lived.
Their solution was to build a high speed network all themselves.
I found that story inspiring because they didn't just go out and raise a lot of money
and pay a company to do it.
They installed it all themselves and got themselves trained in all the skills they needed to
get the job done.
In early 2015 my phone and broadband services were both out of action for about three days.
In frustration I cycled down to Nick's village in the hope of speaking to the BT engineers
who were said to be there trying to resolve the problem.
The room was correct and what they told me was very enlightening.
The individual copper wires have been repaired on an untold basis for years and years, but
now corrosion was sending in and threatening to create a lot of further problems.
At this point it might be worth describing where I live and how the telecom services are
provided.
I live in South Shopshire which is a very rural area if what is already one of the most
sparsely populated counties in England.
We're in the far west of the country along the border with Wales.
The nearest big city is Birmingham which is getting on for 50 miles away to the east.
In Britain there's massive competition in the telecoms market which to be fair has been
very beneficial for consumers.
If we take the trouble to shop around and haggle we can probably end up paying less for
our telecom services than any other country in Europe.
The downside is that the providers concentrate their investment in the big cities where
the most money has been made.
This leads to city dwellers generally having much faster and more reliable services and
people like me living out in the countryside and also results in some wildly misleading
claims.
Mobile phone carriers for example will routinely publish claims that they serve 95% of the
country.
But when you study the small print you discover it is 95% of the country by population, not
by geographic area.
In Britain the population distribution is heavily weighted to all three regions, London
and the south east, the Midlands and in northwest.
Just covering London and the south east gives you getting on for 35% of the British population
even though it's probably well under 5% of the land area.
Although we have a lot of competition between providers most are really glorified resellers.
This is because apart from a few specialist cable providers they all rely on the BT infrastructure
as their bearer.
The maintenance in this infrastructure is all carried out by some situated BT called
open reach and that's regardless of who you pay for your telecom services.
This penalises rural customers again.
If you lose your service as a result of a problem with the BT network you receive
compensation a few pounds a day.
If a rural connection cabled it with maybe a few dozen subscribers goes down and at the
same time a nearby urban exchange with hundreds or possibly thousands of subscribers goes
down then there's no price for guessing you get the service restored first.
If you rely on the phone or internet to make your living those few pounds in compensation
are really no compensation at all.
The H3R episode about the community Lancashire showed that the clearly oral turn to ways
of providing a telecom services to rural customers but their approach struck me as being very
daunting.
It's not as if we had no internet connections, we did have a copper based service which
might give you around 2.5 megabits on a good day but what we didn't have was reliability
or an upgrade path.
On that day in 2015 with all my connectivity with the outside world lost I decided to
see if anything could be done to improve the situation.
The OpenReach website stated that for my area they were what they called exploring solutions.
But fortunately I knew someday with inside Dolly to OpenReach and here's sure me that
nothing was going to happen for at least 12 to 18 months simply because there's no funding
for it.
Fate has a habit of intervening in events at just the right time.
When the phone and internet services were restored, when the first calls I got was
a friend who lived in a village about 5 miles away.
Not for the first time he deleted some files from his computer without a backup and he
was desperate for me to go around and try to recover them.
That turned out to be a lost cause but while I was showing him how to use cloud storage
in the future, I noticed that his upload speed seemed to be surprisingly fast.
I ran a test and discovered he was getting 17 megs down and about 3 up.
At the internet around his way it was reputed even worse than 9 so I decided to investigate.
Sometimes when people say they know nothing about computers they're just being modest.
There are times though when they really do me what they say and my friend couldn't tell
me anything beyond where his router was located so I had to spend a few minutes following
cables inside and outside the house up to a little white plastic box fixed to a bracket
mounted on an external wall.
It turned out he's landlord had installed a radio based broadband service which had transformed
the internet experience to everyone who nearby who had subscribed to it.
As long as you were prepared to pay the monthly fee a reliable 30 meg connection was just
a phone call away.
A few days later I called the company behind the service and asked them if it would be possible
to extend it the few miles to where I lived.
In doing so I discovered how the service is provided.
From a physical connection to an internet gateway signals are bounced around the area between
relays mounted on the tops of hills of which are lots around here.
The secret is to have an unobstructive line of sight between each relay.
The relays themselves each have a potential range of about 20 miles when it's on
poker for you allows so extending the network isn't actually all that difficult from a
technical standpoint.
The biggest problems it seems are negotiating with landowners to site the relays and to
arrange for a power supply.
The outcome of my call was that the company sent us a way out to take a look at the lives
of the land and the geographic distribution of the potential customers.
The conclusion a few days later was that this service could be extended as long as the
owner of the hill providing the optimum sight for a relay agreed to it.
Before there was any point in approaching him though the company needed to be confident
that the market potentially existed to make the service extend and viable.
There was an implied expectation that I would be able to answer that.
My approach to them was based peel on my own needs.
I only assumed that other people in the village shared my views.
I felt they must do because the subjects of poor broadband connections was a regular
topic of discussion in the pub, but now I needed to quantify it.
It was pretty obvious that the ball was now on my court, nothing was going to happen
unless I made the next move.
My only idea that seemed to be practical was to write a letter to every householder in
my village and the one neighbouring it.
So I drafted a few paragraphs setting out the current position, the slim prospects of
BT doing anything to improve it and what the new company could offer.
I learned a long time ago that the perfect words you write to make a point today were
not seen quite so perfect tomorrow, so I left it a couple of days before finalising the
letter.
They imprinted off about 70 copies and set off that evening to hand deliver them to
every house and farm in the proposed catchment area.
Over the following few days I got emails, a few phone calls and even a couple of personal
visits from people who were interested.
I continually stressed that I had no financial interest in a company that might be offering
the service, but it didn't make much difference.
The letter had made that point loud and clear as well what people insist on referring to
the proposal as your system or your service.
I gave it a couple of weeks to record and collate the responses before I reported my
findings to the company.
Because grants of public funds might be involved in a financing, a waiting has to be applied
to every positive response.
Essentially, somebody requiring to propose service of business use was more valuable
in terms of attracting funding than a purely residential customer.
Armed with my results, the company decided that there was sufficient interest to proceed
to the next stage.
That was to range a public meeting at which the company could explain in detail face-to-face
exactly what they were proposing to provide, how it would be funded and how much it will
cost to use.
A big surprise to me was that quite a lot of the positive comments had come from people
who lived in the surrounding area, but outside my catchment zone.
They would not have received a personal copy by letter, so word of mouth had clearly
been working wonders.
This meant that when it came to publicizing the meeting, I had to print a lot more copies
of notice and travel further afield to deliver them all.
I also put notices on trees, notice balls and other prominent places, whether it be seen
by anybody walking or driving past.
I even got a couple of offers to help with publicizing the meeting, but when I accepted
those offers and asked the people concerned to actually do something, they stopped
reply to my emails.
I thought to let's be my experience in many community ventures, help is offered in the
hope that you don't need it.
The meeting was held on a hot evening in July in the local community hall which I'd booked
for the occasion.
After I'm done with the first people to arrive on the team from the internet company,
they're nothing.
My worst fear seemed to be coming true that people were interested about the plan, but
not enough to actually give up a couple of hours of their time.
However, as I was just beginning to wish I'd never started all this nonsense, a couple
of cars pulled up, followed soon afterwards by a motel cars, people on bikes and people
on foot.
Suddenly, the hall was filling up and I had to set out additional seats.
My 30 or so initial respondents had turned into around 70 people in the village hall.
Once the technicalities of wireless internet had been explained and questions answered,
people were asked to indicate their intention to proceed in principle by filling in a contact
sheet.
There were something like 40 names on the sheet by the time everyone left, that was
more than enough for the scheme to be viable.
Things went quite for a few weeks as the company submitted a proposal to the public funding
body.
Once that was approved, they then had to get permission from landowners from the amount
he not only of the local relay, but also of the additional relays required to get the
signal to our area and to make arrangements for electricity to be committed.
Now, I don't know if it's a usual practice, but in our case, the power supply issue was
resolved by taking a feed from residential property and running it up to local relay
distance about half a mile.
The local relay is mounted on the top of a high-end exposed hill that rises maybe 250 feet
above the village.
It consists of a wooden pole, basically a shortened telegraph pole, which is firmly anchored
into the ground with various devices mounted on brackets to receive the signal from the
previous relay and then retransmit it down into the village.
Now, there's a direct line of sight down to the house at one end of the village, while
a house at the other end received their signal through a sub-relay mounted on the tall
grain silo, the top of which is just with the line of sight of the top of the hill.
Each customer has a small transceiver mounted somewhere outside with a direct line of sight
either to the relay or the sub-relay on top of the grain silo.
The transceiver takes its electricity supply from inside the customer's home using a power
over ethernet adapter.
The transceiver is effectively a router as well, so if you have no need for Wi-Fi, you can
simply extend the ethernet link around your home using power line adapters.
If you do want Wi-Fi, then you just feed the incoming ethernet cable into a wireless router
and then you can set up any kind of connectivity you want.
A big bonus of using the new service is that there's no further dependency on the
BT copper connection, so that can be switched off entirely, thereby saving around 17 pound
a month in line rental.
That means no phone service either of course, but that can be mitigated by subscribing to
the Vonage VOIP or VoIP service, which works out substantially cheaper than the BT line
rental.
So what's the situation now?
Well after the public meeting, I emailed all the initial respondents, telling them my
role was over and asking them to deal directly with the company from then on.
As a result of that, I don't have a definitive idea of just how many people are now using
the service.
Whenever I'm out walking around the area or on my bike, I see transceivers fixed to
walls and chimneys, which identifies the home of somebody has gone for it.
However, if the house is oriented with the rear side pointing towards the relay or sub-relay,
then the transceiver will not be visible from the lane.
This implies there could be more people actually using the service that I'm aware of.
I do know that there are people who are very vocal in criticising the standard BT broadband
service, but still didn't take up the superior new service.
Equally, there are people who never replied to my original letter, didn't attend the
public meeting who are all using it.
Subscribers can select a download speed between 530 megabits a second, rising in increments
of 5 megs.
There's no download limit.
Personally, I've gone for a 10 meg connection, which so far gives me everything I need,
but it's good to know that I can have up to 20 more if my circumstances change.
The Vonage service has turned out to be much better than some people suggested.
The sound quality is sometimes possibly just a little bit down on the old copper-based
service, but not enough for it to be an issue.
So what are my conclusions?
Will the original aim of getting a faster and more reliable internet connection has been
achieved?
Since all the infrastructures installed, we've had winds in excess of 70 miles per hour
at the top of the hill with relays situated and everything carried on working normally.
From our service continuity perspective, I've got no complaints at all.
From a technical standpoint, my only reservation is I've no admin access to the transceiver,
which means I'm reliant on the supply to make configuration change on my behalf, things
like poor forwarding.
The flip side of this is that the company can perform diagnostic and firmware upgrades
remotely, so I'm usually not even aware that they're doing it.
Two years on, and BTN are genuinely close to rolling out fiber connections to the village.
Now whether that means some people who use the wireless system will decide to switch over
remains to be seen.
BTO for all sorts of packages with different permutations of speed, phone calls and
download limits, those which match what I get, including my Vonage contract, all work
out more expensive, so there's certainly no incentive on cost grounds alone.
If you want absolute download speed, then BT can beat the 30 megabits available to me,
but people are often disappointed by our promises of high load download speed.
Obviously 20 makes this certainly a lot better than two, but as you increase the speed,
the performance improvement they experience tells off rapidly, as service speed becomes
more of a limiting factor than the network infrastructure.
A question I've asked myself is whether radio has any inherent advantage over fiber or
vice versa?
It's difficult to come to confirm conclusion while my or another, in terms of the cost
and speed of rolling out the infrastructure, radio has to win hands down.
Think of the expense of digging up roads or erecting poles every few metres to carry
cables around the country, compared with mounting a radio really every few miles.
On the other hand, most cabling runs along public roads, while the best locations for radio
relays are like to be on private land, so the contractual legalities of radio are probably
more complicated.
The need for a clear line of sight between relays and the end user transceiver must make radio
more suitable for rural areas.
In a big town or city, lots of homes will be overshadowed by taller buildings, or other
obstacles, which I think would make radio impractical.
Probably there's no absolute answer, it just depends on where you are and the nature
of the local environment.
Certainly, radio is the ideal solution for where I live, so I have no plans to jump ship
to fire even when it's available, but on the other hand, it's good to know there is
an alternative as the company supply in my connection at the moment is quite small,
so if it were to disappear for any reason, there's no certainty that its services will
be taken over by another operator.
Even though it's likely to be overshadowed in the coming months by the availability
of fibre, a lot of people now have a fast and reliable internet connection, who otherwise
would have had a mediocre one for the last two years.
I have to admit to just an occasional sense of satisfaction when I look up at the top
of the hill, and I see the local relay in a distance, siloated against the skyline,
and I think I did that.
Bye.
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