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Author Topic: Scotland Unveil New Superfast Rural Broadband Voucher Scheme  (Read 1938 times)

gt94sss2

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Scotland Unveil New Superfast Rural Broadband Voucher Scheme
« on: August 19, 2020, 01:25:01 PM »

Might be of interest to some of our Scottish users - I can think of one in particular!

Quote
The Scottish Government has this afternoon revealed the details of their new voucher scheme, which aims to help “ensure superfast broadband access for all” by provide funding of up to £5,000 to help homes and businesses not in scope of either their R100 contracts or commercial roll-outs to obtain a 30Mbps+ capable connection.

More details at https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/08/scotland-unveil-new-superfast-rural-broadband-voucher-scheme.html

The Scottish Government has also launched a new online postcode checker – https://www.scotlandsuperfast.com, which is designed to give homes and businesses information on the superfast roll-out in their area, as well as providing information on voucher scheme eligibility.

Weaver might want to ask them (using their inquiry form) why his postcode doesn't work - at least when I tried it!

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Ronski

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Re: Scotland Unveil New Superfast Rural Broadband Voucher Scheme
« Reply #1 on: August 19, 2020, 03:53:54 PM »

If all the other residents of Heasta claimed vouchers they might have enough to cover the cost.
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burakkucat

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Re: Scotland Unveil New Superfast Rural Broadband Voucher Scheme
« Reply #2 on: August 19, 2020, 06:26:16 PM »

If all the other residents of Heasta claimed vouchers they might have enough to cover the cost.

. . . just to provide a connection to "The Weaving Shed", via an optical fibre.  :D
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NorthSkye

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Re: Scotland Unveil New Superfast Rural Broadband Voucher Scheme
« Reply #3 on: September 17, 2020, 02:45:52 AM »

Quote
The Scottish Government has also launched a new online postcode checker – https://www.scotlandsuperfast.com, which is designed to give homes and businesses information on the superfast roll-out in their area, as well as providing information on voucher scheme eligibility.

Sadly for Weaver, and for anyone else here on Skye, the decision has been taken to dissolve North Skye Broadband Limited, a not-for-profit community benefit society that has been working since 2015 to bring a B4RN (Broadband For the Rural North) style ultrafast 1 Gbps symmetrical FTTH service to the island.  The biggest problem was that not a single penny of funding is available through the National Broadband Scheme 2016 for community schemes: it exists solely as a medium for transferring public sector cash to the private sector, and in rural communities such as exist here, a fragile business plan will always be wrecked by the profit element that telecoms companies demand.

Through a lot of very hard work, a "proof of concept" scheme was designed and planned for around 50 homes and businesses in the Uiginish area near Dunvegan until, a few days after a very successful "contractors' day" in January 2018 for specialised civil engineering companies took place, HIE casually informed us that the €200,000 de minimis funding that had previously been on offer had been withdrawn, due to the formal request for tenders for R100 being issued.  We carried on, awaiting some real R100 progress with the hope of some synergy - after all, we had been stating since 2015 that FTTC was a completely inappropriate technology for sparse rural populations - but even after we sold off our IPv4 allocation from RIPE a year later to raise some cash because we had no money at all, the present impasse due to the legal challenge to R100 in the Highlands has continued to block any progress whatsoever.

By way of comparison, a superfast wireless scheme in the Outer Hebrides ("Connected Communities") was costing taxpayers over £300,000 per year in payments to a private sector consultancy for management fees just to keep it running.  £146m was spent running sub-sea optical fibre from Dunvegan to Carnan (South Uist) but the maximum capacity available from Dunvegan Exchange for the 1 Gbps "proof of concept" was... 400 Mbps. No-one planned for any capacity to be available for local provision!

To add insult to injury, a 4G mast paid for by taxpayers has now been built by EE/BT right in the middle of our "proof of concept" area as infill for the much-delayed ECN that is well overdue to replace Airwave, which itself has been bleeding tens of millions of pounds of public sector cash since it was supposed to be switched off many years ago. 

You just couldn't write this stuff, and I still have a 4 Mbps connection over long-obsolete ADSL Max, with no prospect of any improvement at all any time soon - and BT's USO request site says I'm not eligible because I can already have a 10+ Mbps connection (no, I can't, I've been waiting over ten years for one, and will probably wait another ten, if I live that long!).
« Last Edit: September 17, 2020, 02:57:02 AM by NorthSkye »
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j0hn

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Re: Scotland Unveil New Superfast Rural Broadband Voucher Scheme
« Reply #4 on: September 17, 2020, 04:49:53 AM »

and BT's USO request site says I'm not eligible because I can already have a 10+ Mbps connection (no, I can't, I've been waiting over ten years for one, and will probably wait another ten, if I live that long!).

Have you tried completing the USO form?
A few screenshots showing sub USO 4G speeds was enough for a relative to get confirmation of eligibility despite the online checker claiming coverage already.

Sadly the estimate from BT was over £10k after the USO funding so even qualifying doesn't guarantee a connection.

Quote
£146m was spent running sub-sea optical fibre from Dunvegan to Carnan (South Uist) but the maximum capacity available from Dunvegan Exchange for the 1 Gbps "proof of concept" was... 400 Mbps. No-one planned for any capacity to be available for local provision!

That's likely to be a hardware limitation and not just that there's only 400Mb/s capacity left on the sub-sea optical fibre.
A single fibre can carry many times that.

You'll probably find when OpenReach is paid public money under R100 that the required capacity is magically available.
Dunvegan has a Huawei OLT serving only 4 DSLAM's and less than 320 properties.
There's plenty capacity there for OpenReach to deploy their own network.
Your not fit profit community benefit society wouldn't have been connected to this though.

I read your story on ThinkBtoadband a couple years ago.
It seems you were the victim of unfortunate timing on claiming funding and then silly rules on said funding preventing it being given to community run schemes.

Something like the Balquhidder Community Broadband scheme would have provided the funding required as it involved a private company running the network.

Following the B4RN model might have been an ambition too far.
B4RN only succeeded in the way it did thanks to a large fibre trunk being close enough to connect their network in to and the Chief Executive Barry Forde being an expert in building networks.
They also managed to raise a substance sum to get the scheme started.
Without the proximity of that high capacity fibre trunk running past B4RN's coverage area the costs to startup would have been considerable and the scheme may never have got of the ground.

There a very very few community run fibre networks.
Many have tried to replicate the B4RN model and failed.
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NorthSkye

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Re: Scotland Unveil New Superfast Rural Broadband Voucher Scheme
« Reply #5 on: September 17, 2020, 11:28:24 AM »

Have you tried completing the USO form?
It turns out that the USO site is just wrong, there's nothing faster than ADSL Max.

That's likely to be a hardware limitation and not just that there's only 400Mb/s capacity left on the sub-sea optical fibre.
A single fibre can carry many times that.
Sorry, I didn't explain it very well.  Although it comes ashore only metres from the exchange, there's no local aggregation node for the BT-HIE Seg1.15 fibre and Openreach wanted over £22,000 in ECCs alone to connect us to the nearest node at Edinbane, ten miles away!

I read your story on ThinkBtoadband a couple years ago.
It seems you were the victim of unfortunate timing on claiming funding and then silly rules on said funding preventing it being given to community run schemes.

Something like the Balquhidder Community Broadband scheme would have provided the funding required as it involved a private company running the network.

Following the B4RN model might have been an ambition too far.
B4RN only succeeded in the way it did thanks to a large fibre trunk being close enough to connect their network in to... [snip]
Without the proximity of that high capacity fibre trunk running past B4RN's coverage area the costs to startup would have been considerable and the scheme may never have got of the ground.
That's a pretty fair summary of the exact position, and yes it was ambitious, but five years ago when it all started, it was the only way forward.  The UK was focussed completely on FTTC even though the EU was collectively in firm agreement that no public sector money for telecoms should be spent on anything other than FTTP... the involvement of any private sector company apart from specialist civil engineering for things like difficult road crossings was enough to break any business case, which is still the exact same position today, except that BT has gone into a panic at losing thousands of customers in urban areas to the FTTP start-ups and is scrabbling to catch up.

I went to FTTH 2016 (at my own cost!) and delegates there had nothing but sympathy when they found I was from the UK, it was clear that Openreach was following BT's agenda to "sweat" the copper network for every penny it could, yet now the discussion is how to switch off the copper network.

And here I am, ten years on from coming here, still with sub-5Mbps ADSL Max broadband from 20-year-old equipment and pinning everything on the Starlink network as there's nothing comparable on the horizon (pun intended)... :-(
« Last Edit: September 17, 2020, 11:39:34 AM by NorthSkye »
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