Developments - 2010 to date

Last autumn, the Directors reviewed the technical solution then employed for delivering wireless broadband in the village and concluded that it was unduly limited in the performance, range and reliability that could be offered to subscribers.  With the increase in subscribers and in the range of applications for which broadband is now used, we needed to be in a position to offer greater bandwidth and longer range so as to make the service available to more people and to improve the ‘user experience’ when undertaking data-intensive tasks such as media streaming, making audio and video calls, uploading very large files and using on-line data storage services.

We currently purchase bandwidth of 2 Mbps from the company that provides the fibre-optic internet connection to the village; but we have the capability to increase this.  We have already upgraded the wireless network to have the capability to deliver increased bandwidth to all our subscribers and over greater distances than the original equipment was capable of doing.  And we had a written quotation for the enhanced backhaul supply that we need.

Events elsewhere have, in the mean time, overtaken us. The financial pressures on County Councils have led both Lancashire & Cumbria to review their operational arrangements, and our primary feed - “the backhaul” - previously provided by Lancaster University Network Services is now the responsibility of Lancashire County Council. At the same time, increasing the bandwidth of our backhaul depends on the policies and pricing structures of that new provider - which is and has been unreasonably unwilling to honour the quotations we had previously been given by LUNS.  We have briefed subscribers & users on what looked like a very promising proposal from BT Openreach, but that too now seems to be held up.  So it’s still “watch this space” as we explore other avenues to bring our service up to the standard we all want to see!