Village Broadband brings super-fast broadband to rural UK

Situation

Until 7 years ago, the 5000 residents and businesses of Strixton, and neighbouring villages of Wollaston and Denton had to make do with frustratingly slow, patchy connectivity. Businesses suffered, citing a lack of ability to compete with little or no access to the internet. Businesses looking to the web to drive awareness and sales in their products and services risked losing revenues unless they took matters into their own hands.

Dr Mike Goldsmith was one of these residents, trying to run a successful international health business working often from home, struggling with the poor service offered by the major service providers. Like many of his fellow residents in Northamptonshire, Mike was tired of waiting for the big players to provide high-speed services. Being somewhat of an entrepreneur, he hit upon the idea of building his own local network, built on an existing bonded 4Mb/s leased line.

Mike took on the running of a small fledgling network based on two bonded fibre lines of 2 Mb/s each, which had previously been used and paid for by the local community to provide basic broadband via a Wireless Wide Area Network (WAN) to local residents and businesses. His team of like-minded local volunteers supplemented by an IT professional friend, Alan Denton, who became VillageBroadbands’s Technical Director and masterminded the development of specialist expertise on the latest wireless technology.

This solved the problem for a while, but it became clear that 2 Mb/s between 40 people was not going to offer the kind of speeds needed. At the same time, the Board of VillageBroadband realised that there was an opportunity to build a service that would allow them to extend it beyond the current confines of Wollaston and the other four villages between Northampton and Wellingborough for which they were already providing service. They started investigating how to get a better, more resilient service, which wouldn’t involve the purchase of a costly new fibre line, and would enable them to commercialise the service in the future.

More and more businesses are moving into the business park, and surrounding areas all the time which is bringing more income to plough back into the service. We have high hopes for the future as an example of how people can truly do it themselves and we couldn’t have done it without FluidOne.

Dr. Mike Goldsmith, Entrepreneur

Success

“In the past, local small businesses were struggling to make 2 Mb/s, now we can guarantee 20 Mb/s up and down. What this means is that companies no longer have to rent expensive mid-town premises in order to guarantee decent broadband, with FluidOne’s network, we can offer better speeds than the main players now – something that we won’t see from them for the foreseeable future,” commented Dr Mike Goldsmith.

Since FluidOne started providing Village Broadband with 100 Mb/s superfast broadband, local residents and businesses have capitalised on the increased speeds. Local businesses, such as TaylorFitch, are experiencing real benefits as a result of the project.

TaylorFitch specialises in creating e-newsletters for local authorities and NHS trusts. Its clients include many County, Borough and District councils, as well as NHS trusts. As a result of this high-profile clientele, the company needs to ensure files are sent and received reliably – especially if they’re very data-heavy.

Jo Taylor, Founder, TaylorFitch said: “We have a number of very high-profile public sector clients, and so we have to be able to make sure we can deliver what we promise on time, every time. We’re dealing with publicly funded projects and so having decent connectivity allows us to deliver a premium service.

Before the new service was implemented, all the local businesses shared the same 2 Mb/s line, now we have enough bandwidth to go around and so we never worry about the network failing. We’re seeing our own productivity increase and this has enabled us to drive efficiencies into the service we deliver to our clients,” Taylor concluded.

In the future, Mike and his fellow Directors want to see the service adopted by other villages and which is why he is investing in more technology to aid this expansion. He now has the comfort and deassurance that the County Council now accept VillageBroader as a Faster Broadband Provider under the Rural Broadband initiative and other areas aeas in Britain are now contacting VillageBroadband for help and services. He has seen his portfolio of corporate clients increase exponentially. He said: “More and more businesses are moving into the business park, and surrounding areas all the time which is bringing more income to plough back into the service. We have high hopes for the future as an example of how people can truly do it themselves and we couldn’t have done it without FluidOne.”

• 100 Mb/s rural area download speeds
• Cost effective, tiered pay structure
• Universal village Wi-Fi
• Scalable connectivity solution