Quickline Start BDUK Superfast Wireless Broadband Pilot in North Lincolnshire

ISP Quickline has confirmed that they’ve begun the final deployment phase of their £2,054,000 Government funded superfast wireless broadband pilot in rural North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire (East England), which will deliver Internet speeds of up to 50Mbps and could eventually be deployed around the UK.

The project is one of seven pilot schemes that the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme approved for deployment earlier this year (it use to be 8 but MLL was dropped), which are all testing alternative methods for delivering “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) connectivity to the final 5% of predominantly rural premises.

In the case of Quickline’s pilot the ISPs Managing Director, Steve Jagger, informed ISPreview.co.uk that about 4,000 premises (homes and businesses) should be covered by the service and they’re anticipating take-up of approximately 2000 (c50%); the premises are in poorly served areas where there is high demand for something better.

The infrastructure itself is based off a network of primary wireless mast distribution sites that are connected by 28GHz (Ceragon) links as part of a mesh backbone architecture. The original feasibility study also indicated that this could be an open access network, which would allow rival ISPs access.

The service itself is then distributed out to end-users via Cambium Networks kit working in the 5GHz band. Customers will need to have a small antenna (aerial) installed on top of their homes, which is a fair bit smaller than most TV aerials and Satellite dishes (pictured above). A related pre-registration page has already been setup.

The package options are as follows (the installation fee is usually £150, but this may be less for the pilot areas – see below). Take note that the rental prices might seem high, although unlike most fixed line solutions you don’t have to pay for phone line rental and in that sense the cost isn’t too different.

Home Connect 10
* Download speeds of up to 10Mbps
* Unlimited usage
* 24 Month Contract

PRICE: £29.99 per month

Home Connect 30
* Download speeds of up to 30Mbps
* Unlimited usage
* 24 Month Contract

PRICE: £39.99 per month

Home Connect 50
* Download speeds of up to 50Mbps
* Unlimited usage
* 24 Month Contract

PRICE: £59.99 per month

The deployment phase itself will focus on testing the viability of Line of Sight, Near Line of Sight and Non-Line of Sight technologies, as well as the commercial loan approach from Local Authorities (Quickline has already tried this before as part of its West Lindsey project) and the impact of discounted connection fees (i.e. using a subsidy to cover around 50% of the installation cost).

Installations of the new service are now beginning and the pilot will then run until March 2016. At this point the Government hopes to have gathered enough data to decide how much public investment they will need to commit to bring superfast broadband to 100% of the UK and whether or not wireless broadband will form part of the final Phase 3 BDUK plan.

Several other fixed wireless broadband solutions are also being tested by BDUK via ISPs including AB Internet (Wales), Airwave (North Yorkshire), Call Flow (Hampshire) and Cybermoor (Northumberland).