Free Book Released About B4RN’s Rural UK Community FTTP Broadband Project

A new book has popped up for free online that charts the fascinating history and progress of rural broadband ISP B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North), which is a community benefit society that has so far built their 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover 30,000 premises across England (c.15,000 customers).

Just to recap. B4RN is a registered Community Benefit Society (i.e. they can’t be bought by a commercial operator – so consolidation is not an option – and profits go back into the community) that has already expanded their full fibre network to cover various remote rural parts of Lancashire, Cheshire, Cumbria, Northumberland, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Yorkshire, Northumberland and County Durham – often with the direct help of local volunteers.

The project started out all the way back in 2012 and was one of the UK’s very first alternative networks (altnets) to build full fibre infrastructure, which has had quite a long, successful and fascinating history in the industry. The book about all this – ‘B4RN – The Early Years‘ – is 806 pages long and 1.1GB (GigaBytes) in size to download – giving ‘War and Peace’ a run for its money, mostly due to the heavy use of pictures from their various projects as useful illustrations.

As the book’s co-editor, Kira Allmann (Ph.D.), explains: “This book has been written by B4RN community members. It’s a compilation of written stories, oral histories, photographs, and links. It’s a non-linear, branching tale of key people, places, milestones, and memories, intertwining and intersecting like the roots of a tree.”

Overall, it looks like quite an interesting read, especially for anybody interested in this field and the challenges of rural broadband provision. Granted, this may all be a bit too niche for some people, but then so too is B4RN. The book itself hasn’t yet officially been released (i.e. it might still get a few tweaks), but you can read it today at the public link above.

Just to be clear, this book is not an official B4RN publication, but rather a community-led retrospective written by the original volunteers.