Promising Trouble to Pilot Community-Owned Broadband in London

Non-profit policy developer Promising Trouble – supported by Impact on Urban Health – are preparing to launch a new 18-month project in London (likely around Southwark or Lambeth) next year that will pilot a community-owned broadband service, offering a free or very low cost internet access to those excluded by affordability.

At present very little is known about the pilot, which is partly because it’s still being designed. The team is understood to be looking at various approaches, such as community WiFi, 4G / 5G mobile, using existing cabling and or a virtual network operator model. But the initial demonstrator is being planned to reach 500 households, chosen based on analysis of which neighbourhoods are most excluded.

In theory, assuming they can find a solution that works, then the goal would be to share their experience so that others could setup similar community-owned services around the United Kingdom. But the fact that such services haven’t already taken off should tell everybody something about the difficulties of actually turning this sort of model into a sustainable one.

Broadband provision, of any kind, is not cheap to deliver, particularly if the aim is to offer a “high quality” service to many users.

Rachel Coldicutt, Founder of Promising Trouble, said (Cities Today):

“For now, the most important thing is to make it really work in one neighbourhood and then if that happens, I hope we can help create a bit of a movement around it. But I think getting it working in one place really well is more important than saying we’ve solved it for everywhere.”

At this point it’s worth remembering that a good number of UK broadband ISPs have already launched cheaper (c.£15 per month) social tariffs for those on state benefits (summary of packages), although the lack of historic awareness around these have tended to impede take-up. But in fairness, adoption is rising fairly rapidly and Ofcom recently reported that 220,000 households (up from 136,000 six months ago) had taken such a package, although that still represents just 5.1% of households on Universal Credit (4.3 million).