The Cumbrian village of Fell End, known to tourists for its caravan park and pub, has a new claim to fame after becoming the first remote community in Britain to connect to superfast broadband after digging its own trenches for the cables.
Several “self-dig” projects have started in Britain to connect fibre-optic cables to the main national network, rather than waiting for BT Openreach vans to come in years after big cities and populated areas have been upgraded. Those villages that can raise enough money to speed up the installation may tap the Rural Community Broadband Fund, made available through the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, to subsidise the development.
Other communities have hired BT using the funds, but Fell End, a community of 58 premises, did the work itself. The residents raised £6,000, which was matched by £53,000 in funding from Defra and £26,000 from the Prince’s Countryside Fund. The nine-mile (15km) network is open to all telecoms companies and six residents signed up immediately to benefit from speeds of up to 330Mbps.
Fell End was also a guinea pig for a new type of cable laying technique called “mole ploughing” — digging equipment drills through rough terrain while pulling the cable along at the same time.
Rory Stewart, the MP for Penrith and The Border, the local constituency, said he would like the Fell End model to be adopted in other rural areas. “Now that we have done it once, I’d like us to repeat this model again and again across Cumbria and then across rural Britain,” he said.
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Paul Bonsall, who runs the local The Fat Lamb Country Inn, immediately connected to the new network. “We’ve gone from about 2Mbps to around 60Mbps, which is fantastic,” he said. “We could have gone much faster but we decided that would be OK for now. We are quite heavily reliant on a good broadband connection for our business. We have 12 rooms here and guests expect to have a good wi-fi connection.”
There have been several attempts to build rural community broadband projects. Small, specialist companies, such as B4RN and Gigaclear, have connected villages while communities in Kent and Oxfordshire have partnered with BT to engineer an upgrade.
Not all projects succeed, however. A rollout in Selling, Kent, hit problems after the cost of the plan rose to £500,000 from a projected £130,000 even before many homes were connected.
Bill Murphy, managing director of BT’s next-generation access division, said: “The people of Fell End are true pioneers who have worked tirelessly with boundless enthusiasm and commitment to see this ambitious project to fruition.”