Connect 8 Campaign Hopes to Bring Fast Broadband to South Oxfordshire

A group of eight rural villages in southern Oxfordshire (England), which includes Howe Hill, Britwell Hill, Cookley Green, Greenfield, Park Corner, Pishill with Stonor, Russells Water and Swyncombe, have clubbed together in order to launch the Connect 8 campaign that hopes to persuade BT to improve their broadband connectivity.

At present the local state-aid supported Better Broadband for Oxfordshire project is already working with BT to extend superfast broadband access (24Mbps+) to 90% of the county by the end of 2015 and this could rise to 95% under a planned extension to the umbrella Broadband Delivery UK programme.

On top of that altnet provider Gigaclear are also working to deploy a 1000Mbps capable fibre optic network to some other parts of the county and the separate Cotswolds Broadband project is similarly focused on covering the whole of West Oxfordshire (Chipping Norton).

But so far most of the Connect 8 communities appear to exist outside of the primary ‘Better Broadband’ project, while the Henley Standard notes that many of the affected locals receive sub-1Mbps speeds or suffer from generally unreliable broadband connectivity, which is despite claims that 50% of people in the area are home workers.

Liz Longley, Chair of Swyncombe Parish Council, said:

“We are deeply concerned at the level of our current broadband speeds, which are at the levels of anything from zero to 2Mb per second. This is useless for all residents, whether they are working from home, wanting to download films or data, research for home study for students of all ages as well as recreational use.

One parishioner recently lost an important business deal because the speeds were so slow. Fast broadband will just touch the outskirts of our collective parishes, i.e. Christmas Common, Britwell Salome, Bix and Watlington, so our question is: when are we going to get fast broadband?”

The campaign, which has so far received support from 50 people, is well timed to coincide with the on-going review for how the next round of public funding from the BDUK programme should be spent. But that is no guarantee that the affected areas will benefit because the current “fibre broadband” coverage goal is 95% and not 100%.

At the same time we hope that Connect 8 will also engage with altnets like Gigaclear, which can often help to provide a viable solution for such isolated locations.