F4RN Begin Phase 2 of FTTH Broadband Network in Fiskerton and Morton

The community funded and built Fibre for Rural Nottinghamshire (F4RN) project, which has been inspired by B4RN and aims to cover the whole of rural Fiskerton and Morton with a 100Mbps+ Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network, has completed its first roll-out phase and connected 83 customers.

We first covered this project nearly one year ago (here) and back then they had already managed to attract £83,000 of their required £150,000 investment goal, which has since risen to £115,000. Thankfully this was enough to get the project started and construction of Phase 1 has now completed (shown as a green line on the map below). Some 83 customers are already live out of 100 subscribed (the goal is 150).

The network itself is a combination of both fixed wireless connectivity and pure fibre optic lines, with the wireless service acting as somewhat of a temporary broadband solution while the main FTTH/P network is rolled out to all or nearly all of the 370 homes (future service speeds could be upgraded to reach nearly 1Gbps).

Phase 2 of the network expansion (shown as a red line on the map below) is now underway and this could soon be followed by a third phase (shown as a dark purple line on the map below), which is provided enough investment can be found to do the job.

However Openreach (BT) has recently started to roll-out their own ‘up to’ 80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) service around the area which, according to the Better Broadband for Nottinghamshire project, will continue to expand its coverage until March 2018.

Never the less this doesn’t seem to have dampened the local spirit for F4RN’s network, which has attracted a strong level of customer retention by encouraging locals to help invest and build the network themselves. F4RN’s ducting also connects to Openreach’s local network.

Dr Paul Newton, F4RN Member, said (here):

“We have just over 100 subscribers and 83 of these properties have already been connected. Robert Jenrick [Local MP for Southwell] joined us for our latest dig and rightly pointed out that superfast broadband is a basic utility for many.

Many homeowners have given us permission to cross their land to dig trenches, while F4RN has had many volunteers who have helped, along with farmers who gave us a plough machine that enabled us to lay the cables deep in some of the trenches.

The aim eventually would be to connect 370 homes in the two villages.”

Local customers tend to pay a service rental of £36 per month and there’s also a one-off £210 connection fee to consider (note: moving from their temporary wireless network to FTTH/P is free), although many consider this to be a price worth paying for the chance to receive symmetrical ultrafast broadband speeds.