A Month of Rural Broadband Connectivity Woes for Shropshire Village UPDATE

Residents in the rural Shropshire (England) village of Brockton (Lydbury North), which sits a few short miles from the town of Bishop’s Castle and is served by a hybrid full fibre (FTTP) and wireless broadband network from Voneus, have for the past month been “plagued with frequent outages and, when it is up, lots of packet loss, essentially making it unusable“.

According to local residents, the new network was originally built by UK ISP SWS Broadband (Rural Broadband Solutions) before they merged with Voneus (here) and only went live a few months ago. The network itself is an unusual one, which sees local premises being served by a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network and then capacity for that being supplied via a c.10Gbps Microwave (wireless) backhaul link back to Bishop’s Castle or thereabouts.

A number of network operators have sometimes taken a similar approach to serving remote rural communities (e.g. Airband), which can work well when functioning normally. Indeed, until recently, some locals were receiving excellent broadband speeds of up to c.900Mbps and low latencies. But for the past month or so the experience has been rather different.

Luckily some homes do still have the old SWS antenna installed from back when the village was only served by a slower Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) link, which we presume must use a different route for its capacity as this service has remained usable as a backup. But not everybody within the community is aware that this is an option (i.e. it came via local word of mouth, rather than an ISP recommendation).

ISPreview Community Member nsmhd said (here):

“All was fine initially when it was installed a few months back but for the past month it’s been plagued with frequent outages and when it is up lots of packet loss essentially making it unusable.

The trouble is, due to the rural location, a mobile phone signal is non existent especially indoors so these issues have caused significant disruption to the village.

I have been onto Voneus support on behalf of my relatives who live there and then been bounced back to SWS as they are still looking after the network.

Latest I have been told [is that] it’s going to take at least 6 weeks to get the issues resolved as the issue is, as I suspected, with the Wireless backhaul link and the parts are hard to get hold of.”

The situation has been made more tedious by the fact that it’s occurring during a period of change, as Voneus is still in the process of taking over from SWS. “It’s been a real nightmare for the people in the village and not helped by the mess of the SWS/Voneus merger making it harder to get through to the right people and support has not been great,” added nsmhd.

However, a meeting was held about the situation at the end of last week, which revealed that Voneus/SWS are hoping to bring the fix date forward (the kit that needs fixing is inside the community). ISPreview has since received a bit more detail.

A Spokesperson for Voneus told ISPreview:

“Due to the requirement of a MEWP and conditions on the ground which were deemed unsafe caused by adverse weather we’ve been unable to repair a fault with the radio. Our engineers now have the green light to carry out the works safely on Monday 29th July. We’re very sorry for the unexpected delay and for the inconvenience this has caused.”

The mention of a MEWP above refers to a Mobile Elevating Work Platform, which is usually a reference to using either a mobile boom (cherry picker) or vertical (scissor) lift vehicle for working at heights. The fact that we’ve recently had a lot of very wet weather across much of the UK may well have made it unsafe to deploy such a vehicle, although there have also been plenty of sunny periods too.

Hopefully in the future Voneus may consider a more permanent solution for better redundancy, although that would push up the costs of their local network and so isn’t always affordable in such areas.

Voneus currently has broadband networks in over 35 counties across England, Scotland and Wales. Residential customers of their full fibre broadband packages pay from £38.99 per month on a 24-month term for their 250Mbps (symmetric speed) package with free installation, which rises to £74.99 for 900Mbps.

UPDATE 30th July 2024

The good news is that yesterday’s engineering work appears, based on early feedback, to have resolve the problem. “The link has now been realigned and capacity is back as expected,” said Voneus.