Superfast Broadband

Community Broadband Project

Dear Roseisle residents  (update for September 2018)

As you know we have for the last several months pursued BT to see if there was any possibility that the Roseisle district could have our broadband service improved.
After approaching the BT community fibre partnership we have received a quote for the provision of fibre to the premises for 75 houses, 50 short of the original 125 applied for.
In essence the cost of this service to the 75 properties would be £356,357 which equates to around £4775 per household.
If you exclude the offer of the voucher scheme of £500, this would leave each household having to find £4275 to see their service improved, and this would take up to 12 months to implement. Details of the offer are at the end of this email.
If we assume that not all of the 75 properties are able or willing to pay this sum, then the figure for each remaining household would increase.
We have 60 days in which to make a decision on whether to proceed.
Unless there are a good majority of the community committed to funding a large part of this offer, this option dose not look viable.
However, we are looking at less costly options which we hope to provide details of within the next few weeks.
When we have more information and the costs look much more affordable, then for those interested we will present it first at the Roseisle community hall and then post the information on the Roseisle website and email it out.
I would like to thank you all for your continued support while we try to get the broadband service to the area improved and also to thank our local MSP Richard Lochhead for his help.
He has actively progressed our predicament with BT community fibre partnership, as well as raising the issue of poor broadband service within rural Scotland with the First Minister in the Scottish Parliament.
Kind regards
Les Huyton
On behalf of the broadband project team
Please find below a copy of the offer provided by BT community fibre partnership for your interest.
Hi Leslie,
 
Please find attached the Openreach proposal for the provision of Fibre to the Premises Ultrafast broadband infrastructure for the properties as detailed within the document  As I always suspected,  this has proven to be a challenging project given the scope of coverage you requested.
 
To provide the infrastructure in the area identified by yourselves, we require to provide the following –
 
11 Km of 36F ULW fibre optical cable 

2.5 Km new overhead spans  

7 splitters

27 new poles

24 joints

4.2 Km of new underground duct provision 

2.989 Km mole-ploughed duct provision

492m carriageway duct provision 

 
There are  Government grants currently available that you could utilise in helping to meet a portion of the costs.  The grants are subject to terms & conditions as set by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport being –
 
i) A property currently being the registered address  of a Small to Medium Enterprise business, a Sole Trader or a Registered Charity would be eligible to a £3,000 grant voucher for the provision of a Fibre to the Premises connection
 
ii) A residential property would be eligible to a £500 grant voucher for the provision of a Fibre to the Premises connection
 
iii) The total value of Residential vouchers cannot exceed the total value of Business vouchers
 
iii) All parties agreeing to a voucher must confirm they will order a broadband service at a minimum 100Mbps speed on a 12 month term to be eligible for a grant. DCMS will seek evidence that an order has been place prior to releasing any funding.
 

As a reminder, Openreach will cover all costs for this project that fall within our own commercial threshold, and the figure below represents the remaining cost that your community would need to contribute for us to deliver an FTTP network – which would give download speeds of up to 330Mbps. These costs are subject to change, pending a survey.

Price (ex VAT) VAT at 20% Price (inc VAT) £356,657.00 £0.00 £356,657.00

Planning and building a fibre broadband network is a complex project. We start with a thorough design process to build a blueprint for your community and we follow that with a survey to make sure there’s enough space alongside all the existing utilities underground to accommodate new cables and equipment.

Once the actual build is underway, you will probably see our engineers at work. During this phase we’ll work closely with local authorities to reduce delays and keep disruption to a minimum and we also check if any road closures may be needed for the installation. After the network is built, we’ll carry out final quality and safety checks. All that’s left after that is to let our service providers know that people can now order a service from them. This is when you can upgrade to fibre broadband via a service provider of your choice.

I’d like to take this opportunity to explain why we think we’re the best people to bring fibre to your community:

– We’re Britain’s leading digital network business and our infrastructure already supports more than 30 million

customers throughout the country – We’ve invested more than £11 billion into our network over the last 10 years and our mission is to build the best

possible network, with the highest quality service, making sure that everyone in Britain can be connected

– The price proposal outlined in this offer letter is valid for 60 days from the date of this letter, and the figure

quoted is the cost payable to Openreach by the community.

– Should you wish to proceed, we have to contract with a Legal Entity (e.g. Residents Group or Managing

Agent/Developer) so you’d need to set one up, if there isn’t one already within your community.

– At the point you sign the contract to proceed, you’ll need to pay 50% of your share of the cost (outlined on the

previous page) at that time and pay the remaining 50% once the new fibre infrastructure’s available for Communication Providers (CPs) to offer service.

– The quote is subject to fibre capacity at the exchange, so a survey will be undertaken and the final price

confirmed to you prior to any formal contractual agreement with Openreach.

– The quote is based on private funding only (i.e. it excludes any local authority funds which would require formal

procurement and state aid approval.)

– Any infrastructure provided, will remain the property of BT and will form part of the BT estate.

– There are, and never will be, any ongoing costs that the community will be asked to bear for the fibre

infrastructure.

– Openreach will take responsibility for all future management once the new fibre infrastructure is provided.

– We will upgrade the infrastructure to make faster broadband speeds available, however to benefit from those

faster speeds, a fibre broadband service will need to be purchased by individuals from a service provider of their choice once the cabinet is live.

– Unfortunately we cannot account for external factors (such as power provision) in the typical timeline for getting fibre broadband to you, but in our experience it typically takes around 12 months from when you sign a contract to the point where faster services can be ordered.

 

Dear Fellow Roseisle Residents (update June 2018)

 

Re: Options for Superfast Fibre Broadband for the Roseisle area

If like us your broadband is slow (under 2 mbps and often much less), then you may be interested in a possible solution. Even though the Hopeman exchange has been fibre-optic enabled, Roseisle village and some of the surrounding area are unable to receive the fibre-optic service, because of the distance from the Hopeman exchange.

The Roseisle Community Broadband Project have therefore been looking at the potential to improve provision of Broadband services to our immediate community, taking advantage of the Scottish Government’s commitment to faster broadband for rural communities. We believe it is possible to access substantial grant money to assist with this, by local residents applying to Digital Scotland via the Highlands and Islands Enterprise, for a £350 voucher towards funding a superfast broadband solution – there are many examples of other communities who have successfully done this. Individual vouchers can then be combined and used towards a BT Openreach community broadband partnership. This means that BT Openreach will also put funding in of up to 75% of the cost. Here is the link if you wish to read more about it: https://communityfibre.openreach.co.uk/.

The more interest we can gain from local residents and businesses, the bigger the chance we could be successful and the lower any cost to the community and residents would be. So even if you aren’t personally currently interested in receiving faster broadband, hopefully you would be willing to add your support to this for the community as a whole. Having superfast broadband is often one of the top requirements for house purchasers and will add to the attractiveness of living in the Roseisle area. As more broadband services such as Netflix, Amazon prime etc are used, this creates a bottleneck which will only slow our current broadband down even further into the future if we do nothing. And if we do nothing as a community, the current Highlands & Islands Enterprise roll out plans mean it is unlikely we will see any roll out of faster broadband before at least 2020/21.

If there is enough community support, including local businesses in the area (to whom we are also writing), we shall be able to approach BT Openreach to start putting some costings together and provide a quote to see whether the £350 voucher eligibility per household would cover the upgrade to superfast broadband. The more people who agree to apply, the more feasible the upgrade is. BT Openreach also contribute to the cost, so we are hoping that with the collective vouchers it would cover all the costs.

Action:

So, at this stage we are not asking you to do anything, other than to let us know if you would support this, and if – when the time comes – you would be happy to apply for one of the £350 vouchers – this does not commit you to anything nor commit you to taking out broadband if you don’t want to – but it would assist the whole community by adding another voucher to the “pot”.

If you are happy to add your support, could you email me at leshuyton@roseisle-news.com or call 07532 404 249 or alternatively we will try and get around to as many of you as we can to answer any questions and check if you are prepared to add your support to this community initiative. Only if we get enough support will it then be sensible to contact BT Openreach to discuss a possible community fibre project. We hope you will add your support to this and become part of the Roseisle Community Broadband Project.

 

Kind Regards

 

Les Huyton

(On behalf of the Roseisle Community Broadband Project)

Superfast Broadband Information

House Prices

Martin Ellis, economist at Halifax, said: “A strong broadband connection is an increasingly important factor when choosing where to live.”

Roseisle area, we’re in the 5%!

Around 5% of the UK isn’t covered in existing national fibre broadband rollout plans and the Roseisle area falls into that group. We want to work in partnership with Openreach to get superfast broadband to our homes and local businesses in 2018. We’ve set up the Roseisle Community Broadband Project to raise money to jointly fund the cost of a new fibre broadband cabinet that will be connected to the national fibre network. Openreach will fund a large chunk of the cost and we need to raise monies to cover the remainder.  We are hoping that the remainder will be covered entirely by every household applying for grants from Digital Scotland, available for each eligible household, in the form of £350 voucher that can be jointly pooled and used to fund our part of the costs.

All the following devices compete for the same limited bandwidth, and basic broadband services with slow speeds is increasingly becoming a major bottleneck. Basic broadband is no longer enough!

∙ mobile phones

∙ iPads and tablets  

∙ e-readers (such as Kindle)

∙ desktop PCs

∙ Sky+ boxes

∙ streamed video services, such as YouTube, Netflix, BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, NowTV, Netflix, Amazon Prime, BT TV and Sky Anytime Plus

∙ fast downloading of HD video content (rather than standard definition content)

∙ streamed music services, such as itunes and Spotify

∙ voice / video telephony services, such as Skype and Apple FaceTime (enabling free calls!)

∙ online backup services, such as Carbonite, Livedrive and Apple iCloud.

Superfast broadband is now almost the same price as basic broadband. The prices of superfast broadband services are falling significantly, and already there’s only a small difference between the price of superfast broadband and basic broadband services.

p.t.o

Superfast broadband could increase house prices

 

A survey carried out by ispreview.co.uk found that 68.8% of respondents would be put off from buying a “beautiful new house”, if it lacked fast broadband.

Conventional broadband services that we have in our area can be unreliable. The current ADSL broadband is carried along copper cables all the way from the exchange to our homes and business premises. Inevitably, the broadband signal suffers a reduction in strength (“attenuation”) as it travels along the copper cable from the exchange to broadband modems, reducing the speeds that can be delivered and making the broadband signal susceptible to interference. In contrast, high-speed fibre broadband utilises fibre-optic cables, which are immune to interference and do not suffer the signal attenuation experienced by copper lines. As a result, superfast broadband services deliver significantly higher speeds and are more reliable.

If anyone has tried like us, to switch to fibre-optic broadband now that the Hopeman exchange has been enabled for fibre, you will have discovered that we are too far from the exchange, resulting in no service whatsoever.