VIDEO Documentary of B4RN’s UK Rural Fibre Optic Broadband Rollout

The community built B4RN project, which is rolling out a 1000Mbps capable fibre optic broadband (FTTH) network to thousands of premises in rural Lancashire in England (inc. parts of Yorkshire and Cumbria), has uploaded an interesting new documentary film that charts their history and on-going work.

The new video (aka – B4RN The Movie: Digging to the Future) starts off by adopting a somewhat 1970’s style theme before highlighting the project’s history. It also shows the work now taking place and discusses some of the problems that B4RN have encountered along the way (e.g. rival services from BT that have a magical tendency to pop up once B4RN enters certain areas).

As usual the content has been very professionally pieced together, with much of the work being done by James Uren and Suzette Heald. It’s also been listed under YouTube’s “Comedy” category, which is befitting of B4RN’s often humours remarks to the many challenges they’ve faced. Sadly the video itself is currently only online in Standard Definition, but hopefully this will soon change.

It’s worth pointing out that B4RN recently connected their 1000th property to the service (here) and only last week two of the project’s longest standing founders – Barry Forde and Christine Conder – picked up M.B.E’s during the Queen’s Birthday Honours (2015) for their efforts to connect rural areas (here). JFDI.