Broadband Update

Following recent coverage in the Village Bulletin and website, over 30 people have registered interest in helping boost the village's presence on Britain's Broadband map. Chris Stephenson, Chair of the West Bergholt Parish Plan Steering Group thanked everyone for responding to the appeal and said that "This is certainly sufficient to move to the next stage of the exercise. Our options for a faster connection speed are somewhat limited, and the best bet appears to be to pursue a 'wireless' means of obtaining an improved signal to the village. To move forward needs support not only from those who have already registered interest but as many more as we can get ."

As well as expressing your interest in better broadband for the village (for which please click this link http://www.westbergholt.net/pp_enquiry.htm) it would also help if you were to add your personal broadband statistics on a speed test website by clicking the following link http://www.top10-broadband.co.uk/speedtest/ (the picture above comes from this site).

The project team will be setting up a meeting during January to help plan next steps, if you would like to be involved please express your interest using the enquiry link above, in the meantime you may be interested in some of the hot topics already raised:

FAQS

Question/Comment	Project Team Thoughts
Reasonable cost required	Pricing will be an issue especially at the moment and a cost under £20 per month would be the aim I suspect.
Fed up with slow speeds – many posting this complaint	Intensive usage eg BBC i-player downloads show how much of an issue this will be in the future for younger generations, and those moving to the village in the future could well be put off locating in a “not spot”!
Broadband required to work from home	Can be virtually impossible if you need to download or upload large files as part of your work especially at peak periods. There are many small one-person businesses operating in the village so this is a real problem.
What range would a new provider cover	Whole village could be covered with 4-6 access points.
Why not canvass via school	Good idea if handled collaboratively with the school.
Initial charge for setting up in peoples’ homes may deter some	Possibly, there could be a trade off between this and an increased monthly cost or a lost leader promotion for first 200 households joining?
3G service improving all the time	True, still poor where I am and is an individual service rather than one for the whole household. Still this may be the best bet for single households or where there is only one user etc.
County Broadband signal picked up in village recently	This is true, but is just an example of how it can be done for an individual not a community.
BT issues on very slow speeds have resulted in numerous visits to some households specially concerning highly contended virtual paths	I guess we all have stories to tell like this. In our household the broadband service used to stop if it was raining, or if somebody had left a message on the answer-phone!
Speeds vary, download speeds of 135kb/sec up to 1.5mb/sec for download reported	We could do with a collective view on this because everyone will quote a different speed when asked!
Are we tied to a choice of just one provider?	Not in theory; we could gauge interest and put out a community tender, but in reality we know that there are only 2 companies in Essex that have developed this market.