Rural Gigabit Wireless Broadband Trial in Wales Delivers 30Mbps+ UPDATE

Homes connecting to a supposedly 1Gbps wireless broadband trial in the tiny rural Monmouthshire (Wales) village of Llanddewi Rhydderch, which is supported by the UK Government, have yet to experience “anything near” to those speeds. A recent council meeting also suggests that the service becomes “patchy when the weather is poor.”

The trial (original story) forms part of the Government’s wider £2.1m 5G Rural Integrated Testbed (5GRIT) project, which was announced last March 2018 (here) and in this specific case is being supported by Broadway Partners (they also run UK ISP Broadway Broadband) and Cambridge Communication Systems (CCS).

The new 5G style network uses a 60GHz “mesh” radio technology developed by CCS to reach hard-to-connect properties, each of which had one of the company’s Metnet 60G Mesh radios attached. The kit operates in the unlicensed mmWave spectrum band from 57GHz to 71GHz and they also appear to be compatible with the 802.11ad WiFi (Wi-Gig) standard (normally used for short range indoor networking).

At the time of our first report (February 2019) we remarked that exact details of the trial setup were unclear, although the use of mmW spectrum pointed to a very short-range network. Such signals don’t travel very far so the homes would have to be fairly close together, most likely fed by a longer range wireless relay positioned nearby and higher up. But initial feedback suggests that the promoted speeds of 1Gbps have not materialised.

Llanover Community Council Meeting

“With regard to the issue of fast broadband, the Clerk reported that he had heard from Lucy Hywel [Local champion for the project] that the trial of the Broadway system will come to an end shortly.

At the present time users are not experiencing anything near the 1 gigabyte [clearly they meant ‘gigabit’ here!], as promised, on the basis that they have been marketing the project. Also, the service appears to be patchy when the weather is poor.

Lucy will be meeting Broadway representatives … to establish how many houses the system will reach and what the proposed plans are to meet the needs of properties outside the inner boundary of the village.”

We understand from other sources that the issues with poor weather have now been overcome. A plan also exists to potentially extend the network to properties further away.

At present we understand that 6 properties are testing the technology and all are now said to be achieving consistent and reliable speeds of up to 30Mbps (we think some local properties might be able to get similar using 4G mobile), which is obviously a big improvement over the previous sub-1Mbps fixed lines on Openreach’s (BT) old copper network. Nevertheless this is many times slower than the heavily promoted 1Gbps (1000Mbps+).

According to the council, Lucy was assured by Broadway Partners that 1Gbps is “obtainable“, although the operator appears to be quoted as telling her that “as nobody really needs these levels there serves no purpose in providing it” (except perhaps for the fact that the promoted purpose of the trial was to try and deliver 1Gbps to a rural community, wasn’t it?). The quote is not clearly attributed.

Broadway Partners recently won the Most Viable 5G Use Case award at the 5G Realised event in London for their deployment of 60GHz mesh radio in Llanndewi Rhydderch, which they merely said is “delivering Gigabit-capable service to a rural community.” Hopefully they can show such performance via tests at local homes in order to confirm that it’s possible, even if not yet needed.

Despite these issues it’s understood that the community is still happy with the current improvement and Lucy is preparing to recommend that the entire village switch to the new network. In the meantime we’ve shot off an email to Broadway in the hope of getting some clarity on the live tested network capability.

UPDATE 2nd July 2019 (8:08am)

Barry Weaver from Broadway Partners has responded to clarify some of the points raised by the council and Lucy Hywel.

Apparently the operator also deployed a “separate” 30Mbps service alongside the Gigabit pilot (we’ve not seen this stated anywhere before) and this used the lower 5GHz frequency band because, in referencing the Gigabit pilot itself, they “simply didn’t have enough 5G equipment for everyone” (please don’t confuse 5G and 5GHz here, 5G is a mobile technology standard where as 5GHz is a radio spectrum band).

The operator added that they haven’t had any complaints from customers (although they do intend to ring around to ask) and were able to deploy Gigabit speeds into the village hall in less than a month via the mmWave bands connected to the backhaul fibre 5km away.

Barry Weaver said:

“In addition to a 60GHz mesh pilot, there is a separate 5GHz and UHF overlay. This is so that the rest of the village could connect to a service. We committed from our own funds to help the village with 100% superfast coverage. We didn’t feel it was right that some got good speeds whilst the rest of the village only got 1mbps via copper.

We also committed to giving the village hall a free broadband connection which is in and working. This is free for anyone to utilise as a community benefit. We also lit Llanarth Village Hall and are in the process of lighting up a local church with free superfast broadband. If you are a village hall or place of worship and within our network footprint, that’s what we do.

At the risk of disclosing too much information, I can confirm limited details regarding the rain issue but was a fault logged by a 5GHz customer. There was an incident prior to the meeting recorded by the Clerk where a 5GHz CPE was replaced as faulty. It is possible there was water ingress – assumption. Because this was an issue several months ago I was not able to offer Mark an immediate answer – in truth I had not been aware and had to consult the ticketing system for potential answers. The team just fixed it as per usual fault escalation processes.”

According to Barry, the quote in the council meeting (“nobody really needs these levels..“) could be a personal opinion from somebody, albeit not Broadway’s own official position.

UPDATE 18th July 2019

Lucy Hywel has posted the following update on this trial.

LLANDDEWI RHYDDERCH BROADBAND UPDATE NO. 4

In my last update I talked about a trial taking place in the village with a Liverpool based company (Broadway Partners)

As with any new project there have been a few teething problems most of which have now been ironed out and over the course of the last two months we have seen some very consistent and reasonable speeds of around 30mbps.

The aims of this project has always been to try and get high speed connectivity to the whole of the village and at a fair price.

Broadway’s pricing structure is similar to that within the market place. Speeds are much greater than we are presently experiencing, they are also starting to get to properties that are further out on the boundary line of the village and remain confident they will reach the majority of the village if not all.

Technology continues to change but I am still a fan of fibre to premises and this remains the recommended route by those in the industry. Discussions along this line have taken place with Broadway and in my last meeting fibre to premises started to become a possible option however this would be a future project. This is refreshing news bearing in mind that to date no other provider has even considered looking at us let alone talking about the option of fibre to premises.

I am recommending that we go forward with Broadway. In the majority of cases there will no connection charges for householders as Broadway will use available grants from Welsh Government to cover the costs.

Where do you go from here:-

It is your choice who you use, I am just making a recommendation. If you would like to proceed or find out more Broadway will be holding a pop in surgery in the village hall on the 29th July 2019 from 4.30pm – 8pm where you can come along and discuss on a one to one basis the options available to you. (It would help if you were able to bring your existing telephone and internet contract with you).

From this surgery we hope to get a much clearer picture of how many of the harder to reach properties need to be connected and then we can look to finding routes to connect these properties. For easier to reach properties connection is much quicker and can take place immediately.