I've always liked the idea of the B4RN's project.
I am confused though. How is it that B4RN can install full fibre and it still be cost effective? (I am assuming it is cost effective).
It is cost-effective. Most certainly cost-effective. But it isn't, in the full sense of the word, commercial.
Who pays for all the materials?
The locals have raised the money themselves - perhaps over a slightly wider community at first, but later on a parish-by-parish basis. This is also the way they've organised the work too.
The figure in my head is somewhere around £1,000 per home, but that might be out of date by now. The money essentially comes in as loans, that start out as interest-free, and start paying some interest after a while. If you loaned £1,500 at the start, you'd get a year's free connection.
That money pays for real stuff - ducting, fibre, cabinets, switching and routing gear.
The work of digging in the ducting, and blowing in the fibre itself, is done by volunteers, who comprise farmers (if they want to dig through their own land) or locals. They are paid (IIRC) in shares. Almost all of the digging goes through farmer's land, and is as easy for them as digging in drainage, effectively. This takes away a huge chunk of the Capex needed to install the fibre.
Money also isn't needed for wayleaves. Commercial telco companies, like other utilities have to organise wayleaves from landowners for the cables/service crossing land - both underground and overhead. They then have to pay annual rental. B4RN also have to organise wayleaves - but don't pay any annual rental.
Now, farmers/landowners aren't ever going to volunteer to install ducts for a commercial company. And they aren't ever going to agree to not receive rental from a wayleave for a commercial company. So B4RN is carefully constructed as a community interest company so that farmers know they are helping their community - and, of course, will come out of the deal with stonking broadband too.
So the money raised is for hardware, but not for labour or wayleaves. Eventually, the loans will start to be paid back, once there is enough operating income to do so.
How does it connect to the Internet? Through a BT exchange or somewhere else?
The connections to the internet happen in Manchester.
Backbone fibre runs through the country, and it happens that Zayo (used to be known as Geo) had some dark fibre than runs through B4RN's area. Some at the northern end, some at the southern end. B4RN rent some of the fibre from them, from these two locations, into Manchester. They then run their own DWDM kit from those two places into Manchester, so are capable of lighting the fibre, and then adding extra wavelengths as needed (up to 32 wavelengths, each 10g).
More details from this presentation that Barry Forde did:
https://indico.uknof.org.uk/getFile.py/access?contribId=13&resId=0&materialId=slides&confId=29and the Youtube presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXYaAd5ubokAt the risk of starting the whole full fibre debate.. I do wonder why we have examples of companies/groups able to make a profile from full fibre, while on the 'big scale', its always said to be too expensive.
Money.
B4RN relies on two major things:
a) The labour of volunteers, and the fact that the work across those vast distances can be done by volunteers. Digging across pasture is something farmers can do easily, with none of the consideration needed when you run this stuff on the highway.
This is one of the biggest costs of deploying fibre to commercial companies - paying labour for the civil engineering, of either digging in fibre, or clearing blockages from decade-old ducts.
b) The free wayleaves are the difference that makes it viable to run the fibre through farmland in the first place, rather than the highway.
Right now, B4RN subscribers pay £30pm. I calculated, a few years back, that paying the standard NFU wayleave rates would put their average bill up by over £10pm.
We've seen (with mobile masts) how some landowners hold the mobile companies to ransom, by denying access to stop by and repair a broken transceiver. They want more money ... and BT's response is to send their networks via the highway. It costs more to dig in, in the first place, but you pay no annual rent, and you get no access problems - except for the rules relating to roadworks.
In the end, the whole thing with volunteers and wayleaves becomes the thing that makes B4RN viable. But it also means it cannot be copied by anything commercial.
The other aspect is the ~ £1,000 per home raised for investment. That part is the "risk" that locals have put into the project in the first place, and is a similar risk to that needed by BT, KC, Sky or TalkTalk.
Because B4RN is a community project, there is some amount of community-spirit that binds the locals to the project - which means the locals are a little more likely to buy the service even when BT do stop by and put an FTTC cabinet in. That buy-in helps B4RN to attract a high-take-up (60%+), and feel happy that subscribers will stick around - hopefully for long enough for those loans (from locals) to get paid back.
The investors that put the money into BT, KC, Sky and TalkTalk aren't happy with the risk associated with the rollout, achieving such a high takeup and keeping it for sufficiently long.
It would be good if what happens with B4RN could be re-created in other parts of the country too.
It can be replicated, but only if the locals are able to include those volunteering and wayleave elements. You need to persuade more than 60% of locals that this is their only hope, and agree to sign up. 60% is high (ask any locality trying to get to the 30% threshold that Gigaclear requires), and you need some decent technical people leading it that people will trust, but also some decent "opinion shapers" who can help persuade locals.
However, it all falls apart when you can't do the work through volunteers and wayleaves - and that happens when you stop being rural.
Right now, distribution of fibre to villagers most happens from the fields surrounding the village - into back gardens. Volunteers might be able to manage distribution in soft, green verges (and companies like Gigaclear excel in these places) . But once volunteers get to places where they run out of "fields and back gardens", they will find it harder (impossible?) to put their fibre down roads and solid paths. Once the village stops feeling like a few houses around a village green, and starts to feel like 5 or 6 semi-urban streets, then I think the feel of distribution changes radically.
If you can't put fibre down the highway (paths or roads), the alternative is to use people's gardens (front or back). Instead of convincing one farmer of the mutual benefit, you now have to persuade dozens of individual householders - and any one NIMBY (literally) can scupper things for the whole street.
Volunteers and free wayleaves can only get you so far...
Things also fall apart when you get to places large enough to get a BT FTTC cabinet or two. The ability to get cheap-ish fibre from TT or Sky, as part of a bundle, starts to appeal too much.
Chris Conder (a B4RN activist) believes that once you put fibre in, B4RN-style, the rest of the country will follow commercially, led by demand. The larger villages will see the fibre in the small villages, and demand the same. The towns will see the large villages, and demand the same. Etc, Etc.
I'm not sure - especially after seeing how villages cope with attracting 30% take-up when there is a semi-decent FTTC cabinet in the village.
I'd be also interested if Ofcom did make changes to the current setup to maybe have another body formed to organise the deployment of fibre technology, with the aim of bringing advice and debate from all the leading groups and ISP's together. Hopefully this would benefit everyone involved.
This post has gone on quite long enough - but this is a whole different avenue. There is perhaps scope for some sort of joint-interest body, to use in locations where BT/Virgin competition isn't enough to bring their own version of "fibre".
