Rural Fell End Broadband Project Finally Goes Live in Cumbria UK

The £88k+ Fell End Broadband project in Ravenstonedale (South East Cumbria, England) has announced that its partly community built fibre optic (FTTH/P) network, which covers just 58 properties including 28 businesses over an 11km area, is now officially live.

The mole ploughing focused civil engineering work (small diggers are used to both drill underground and pull through the new fibre optic cable) to install a 15km long Fibre-to-the-Premises network, which was led by Ravenstonedale Parish Council in partnership with BTOpenreach, TS Trenching, DEFRA’s Rural Community Broadband Fund, The Holehird Trust, TalkTalk’s Digital Heroes and the Prince’s Countryside Fund, actually occurred back in April 2014, but today the service itself has finally gone live.

Previously the best that many local homes and businesses could hope for was a sub-2Mbps broadband download speed, but the new infrastructure is technically capable of delivering BT’s top FTTP download speed of 330Mbps (although some early users seem to be reporting speeds that are more akin to FTTC performance).

Paul Bonsall, Owner of the Fat Lamb Country Inn, said:

“We’ve gone from about 2Mbps to around 60Mbps which is fantastic. 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 wifi connection. They want to be able to upload images of their holidays straight away on social media to show their friends and family what they have been doing. Now we have enough bandwidth to keep everyone happy all of the time.”

Rory Stewart, Penrith and the Border MP, said:

“This is Cumbria showing Britain how broadband can be delivered to the most remote places in the country. It is a project driven by the community, supported by BT and the Government – and it reaches the most inaccessible area at a fraction of what it would cost to do through Government alone.

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. It will provide the key to ensuring 100 per cent of Britain has the option of superfast broadband, and will make sure that we in Cumbria have the best rural coverage in Europe.”

In a tweet this morning the Fell End team also confirmed that “20 properties are now lit [and] 20 more are expected to be lit in the next three weeks” (although the official PR says there are 6 subscribers).

BT also said they provided “extensive network materials and manpower for the project“, although a spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk that they haven’t yet put a number on their contribution but it’s unlikely to be small.