B4GAL Start Building 1Gbps Broadband to 9 Rural Lanarkshire Villages

The rural South Lanarkshire (Scotland) villages of Abington, Crawford, Crawfordjohn, Elvanfoot, Lamington, Leadhills, Roberton, Wanlockhead and Wiston look set to benefit after a local community project (B4GAL) confirmed the start of their community-owned and superfast Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) based network deployment.

We first reported on the B4GAL (Broadband for Glencaple and Lowther) scheme in 2012 (here), which is a project that appears keen to mirror B4RN’s ‘Just Do It’ approach. Back then B4GAL was still in the very early stages and only just beginning to progress towards the network mapping phase.

Since then various meetings have been held and we assume funding pledged, yet we still know precious little about the structure of B4GAL’s approach; although their service pricing is likely to follow B4RN’s example by charging £150 for a connection (note: this is from their website, but remains unconfirmed).

The B4GAL vision is for a community-owned broadband social enterprise that delivers NGA broadband through fibre optic cables to every home (FTTH), which will be partly built and funded my locals. Any profits that are made will be put back into sustaining other community projects.

Happily the new network appears to now be moving forward and in a brief Tweet last night the project said, “It’s taken 2 years, but we’ll have a 1Gb secure ring for 9 villages by end of [the year]“. This would be in keeping with their existing timetable, which originally “expected that all homes and businesses in the 9 villages will have access to optic fibre superfast broadband before the end of 2014.”

But deploying the core network by the end of 2014 doesn’t strictly mean that all local premises will also be able to gain access to it within that same timeframe. We have asked for more details concerning the current funding and deployment plans because B4GAL’s website hasn’t been updated for several months.