On Thursday night a meeting of over 50 residents of Colintraive and Glendaruel agreed to take the next step towards improving the parlous broadband provision in ColGlen. With Community Broadband Scotland’s help (ably represented by Campbell Cameron on the night) those present tasked the Development Trust to take the community into the feasibility phase of the process which began with a scoping study carried out over the last three months.
The Scoping study, available here, shows what we already knew – very few people achieve more than a .5MB connection on the present service. There is an appetite for a better level of connectivity and a frustration with the present service.
The meeting discussed what is happening at a national level, how we are placed in that, and when BT might get around to upgrading our service themselves. Once the feasibility study is in place the community can then make an informed decision as to whether we should move forward with our own project or await BT’s own provision sometime in 2016.
Do you know where you would get your backhaul from if the decision is to do your own scheme? Vitally important that you can access good backhaul which can be kept up to date speedwise. We were the first community to get CBS funding and have found the process painful. Of 6 pilots selected 18 months ago, Applecross is the only one that has a scheme in place, mainly because we were underway before CBS asked us. At the moment it’s not fast enough for current demands and not future proof. And we have reached the limit of our de minimis allowance.
Hi Alison, Ah yes, there’re a whole heap of hurdles. Backhaul and de minimis being only two. The backhaul would possibly be dealt with bundling connections from our nearest fibre optic source (Bute). De minimis is the real stinker in all of this. As a Development Trust we’re looking at a variety of projects, this being one, and we’re already nearing our upper limit. The community of users therefore will probably have to form an entirely independent co. to work on this project. However, given our situation as a Development Trust we are pursuing a change in the Scottish Government’s attitude towards de minimis – look at the English experience where community organisations simply tick a box and are exempted. We seem to have found some traction and there is an active effort to change things in the SG.
At the moment de minimis is limiting successful communities and inadvertently causing rural areas to slip further behind our urban counterparts.