ISP Airband Angers Village by Erecting Poles for FTTP Broadband

Wireless and fibre optic UK ISP Airband, which holds a number of multi-million pound state aid fuelled contracts to deploy “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) across rural parts of Devon, has attracted a furious response by erecting new telegraph poles in a village that previously had them removed following a campaign.

At present Airband has already completed their £4.6m contract to cover 5,800 premises in the Dartmoor and Exmoor National Parks (here) and on top of that the Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) project has also previously awarded them a £7m Phase Two contract to reach parts of Northern, Central and West Devon (LOT 4). Overall the operator is contracted by CDS to cover 21,000 premises.

Initially most of their deployments tended to involve a Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) broadband network but CDS has also been working with Airband to increase their coverage within LOT 4, not least by including more Gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) builds in remote rural areas.

However the ISP appears to have rubbed residents in the beautiful coastal North Devon village of Berrynabor up the wrong way after they began installing new telegraph poles to run their overhead optical fibre cable. The problem is that the village previously conducted a successful campaign to get all of the local telephone and electric cables put underground and, where possible, poles removed (some still remain).

Suffice to say that Airband’s decision to add new ones has not gone down well with locals residents, which accuse the ISP of having “vandalised” their beauty spot (Devon Live). Some residents also claim that Airband’s engineers have occasionally trespassed on the gardens of local home owners in order to plan the position of future poles.

“The village is in uproar about this and ask that the council stop the work immediately,” said one local. Questions have also been raised over why Airband couldn’t make use of existing poles and underground ducts, although doing so would have attracted a cost and duct space could have been limited (we suspect it was simply easier / cheaper to do their own poles).

A Spokesperson for Airband said:

“We take pride in the positive response we normally have from the communities that we serve – many of whom specifically request our services in recognition of our expertise in delivering rural broadband.

In Berrynarbor, many residents are desperate for better broadband – especially in Sterridge Valley where households are currently struggling with speeds of 0.5 Mbps as well as poor mobile phone coverage.

One Sterridge Valley resident told us ‘I’m absolutely over the moon that we are going to be getting the best fibre to door internet that is available. We’re currently paying for BT internet which doesn’t work most of the time – 0.5 Mbps -, and we have had more than 200 Openreach visits in the past four years.’

We are delivering ultrafast fibre to the premises – FTTP – broadband in Berrynarbor – which will mean they are one of the first areas in both Devon and the UK to have access to broadband speeds of up to 200Gbps, with the government funding a large proportion of the cost, via the Connecting Devon and Somerset broadband programme. As well as boosting property value and helping support local tourism and business, access to ultrafast opens up huge potential for residents and businesses in the area.

Our Berrynarbor network will provide access to ultrafast connectivity for over 140 premises. Ninety-eight per cent of our network in Berrynarbor uses existing poles and underground ducts. To complete the network and provide ultrafast connectivity to the area, we have installed three new poles – all of which are sited outside the village centre and close to other existing poles. We worked closely with North Devon AONB to ensure these poles are not impacting in any way on the beauty or environment of this lovely village.”

The remark about broadband speeds of up to 200Gbps being available is perhaps a little misleading (the fastest residential package on their website is 100Mbps and 1Gbps seems possible via their setup) and most likely only refers to the backhaul capacity, rather than end-user connections. In reality it’ll be awhile before end-users can realistically access or harness 200Gbps but the physical fibre itself could certainly handle that.

As ever there can sometimes be a difficult balancing act between protecting the beauty of an area and ensuring that local homes and businesses are able to access the latest cutting edge broadband speeds, which are in many cases now better in this village than many urban towns or cities.

Meanwhile the bad news for angry locals is that Airband has already completed their deployment and it remains to be seen if a new campaign will be started to have the poles removed. Over the longer term we think it’s likely that residents could see greater advantages than disadvantages, as well as the potential for rising property values.

At the last update for North Devon it was noted that Airband had so far deployed to cover 7,369 premises and were on target to serve a further 3,500 over the next few months (at the last count they had more than 850 live customers on this new network).