A team of documentary makers from the EU have published a lovely video that examines the excellent work being done by the Balquhidder Community Broadband project (CIC), which is currently rolling out a new 1Gbps FTTP broadband ISP network to serve all 197 premises in the remote rural Balquhidder area.
We’ve already written about the Balquhidder project earlier this year and so won’t repeat ourselves (here). The deployment itself is expected to cost about £430,000, with £100k coming from local ISP Bogons, plus £175K from Stirling Council and some extra joint funding with them and the LEADER EU scheme of £30K. The remaining shortfall of £130,000 could be tackled by the new Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (c.40-50 businesses in the area should qualify for this).
Richard Harris, BCB Director and Founder, said: “Given that we’ve had a useful amount of EU funding (via LEADER) for our project, they sent a film crew along to make a couple of documentaries about us, where we’ve got to and where we’re going in future.”
Needless to say that the video is well put together and well worth a watch to see all of the good work being done in the area.
Good for them. Using their own initiative to build their community fast and reliable internet. It’s a shame it had to come to that but isp/openreach are businesses at the end of the day and they have to keep the lights on too. I just wish the government and local councils would help out these hard to reach areas first and foremost, especially those with poor speeds or no broadband at all.
Interesting vid also, lets hope it inspires more communities to help themselves when no one else will.
Commendable effort. I wish more people were doing this. I know there are a number of projects underway, however.
It’s such a shame however that they’re having to resort to this. The ISPs need to be doing more and the government need to be funding full fibre (old point made many times, I’m aware).
Britain was so slow on the uptake with the internet. It was so easy to see how it would revolutionise people’s lives.
Well done to them. I can see this is far easier to do when a whole area has been ignored, rather than when the village centres have been cherry picked, and just the out lying rural properties ignored.
@Brian, exactly my thoughts. Our BDUK left a lot of EO lines around the periphery of my village without FTTC when they rolled out superfast broadband. There are not enough properties in any locality to make any form of community solution viable. And we have a long wait ahead of us for FTTP to roll out as we are seen as the lowest priority (being uncommercial). We could wire our local area up ourselves but obtaining any form of backhaul to connect it to makes the whole approach impossibly expensive.
Nice work guys!
A nice stroke of luck to have access to a huge amount of backhaul bandwidth via the Bogons bunker.