The view from Steve Baker’s North Devon base is magnificent. Cliffs, surf, green hills. Speaking to EG from the bottom of his garden – one of the spots where the mobile signal is good – Baker, the chief executive of serviced office business Ventia, says he has got plans to add some business strength to the local landscape. But it all depends on broadband.
Baker has spent six years running Ventia remotely from Pickwell, North Devon. Broadband is patchy. Speeds are slow, and “superfast” is a description of gambolling lambs, not megabytes per second.
In tiny Pickwell a 3G connection is rumoured, but somewhat mythical. You can sometimes get it west of Tiverton. A 4G mobile connection is more or less unavailable anywhere west of Bristol.
So Baker is planning to create a 3,000 sq ft Life Hub in Croyde, North Devon, where work will meet lifestyle – a Shoreditch by the sea.
The Life Hub will provide remote workers with not just workstations (90% will be taken permanently with 10% for drop-ins), but also a relaxed café environment to work in, the chance to network and bike/surf racks stationed outside. Most importantly, it will have good broadband.
“Where I am we have a weak BT service and some satellite broadband, which is not impressive. It is just powerful enough to stream videos, except during holiday periods when all the visitors log on and streaming goes off the radar,” Baker explains.
Official government figures show that North Devon is the 584th (out of 650) worst-served area for superfast broadband, with just 46% of connections making the grade. One household in 10 cannot even get to 2MB, regarded as the minimum standard connection.
Baker says there are plenty of local businesses – mainly sole traders – who would use his new digital hub. “It is a fantastic lifestyle here but working at home can be isolating. Plenty of people work at home a couple of days a week, but would like to work away from home another few days, and this is where the hub comes in,” he says.
Three years of work on viability and a long location hunt will come to fruition in 2016. Negotiations with a landlord are already in hand, and the business plan suggests a user charge of £150-£200 per person per month. The base rent is £6-£8 per sq ft. If it works, more rural hubs will follow.
James Del Mar, head of rural consultancy at Knight Frank, says: “Rural broadband is of fundamental importance to the viability of all business, including rural business – and increasingly the rental market for residential property too. Those looking to move into an area always want to know whether the broadband is capable of servicing their requirements.
“Some very good farm building conversions struggle to let for the best rents if broadband access is deficient or too slow. Conversely, good, fast access is a selling point,” he adds.
Del Mar does not think developers rank broadband high on their list of concerns – they have bigger fish to fry – but micro-developments can be severely impacted by a lack of broadband connectivity.
“Buildings converted for commercial use 15 or more years ago often have poor telecoms infrastructure, so you see fewer blue-chip tenants, or they are empty, or converted into holiday lets,” he says.
Making a good, superfast broadband connection is a hurdle. Baker is looking at bonded lines (which protect the service from surges in tourist demand) to local home-made solutions (see box, above right).
In 2010 the government allocated £530m to provide everyone in the UK with access to broadband with a download speed of at least 2MB per second and to bring superfast broadband (at least 24MB per second) to 90% of UK homes and businesses. They added another £250m to the pot in 2013 to increase coverage to 95% by 2017.
For those living in the missing 5%, progress is slow or non-existent. BDUK, the government’s broadband delivery agency, is running a series of pilot projects concluding in March 2016 to find a solution for the very-hard-to-reach areas – about 3% of households in areas with a housing density of under 500 premises per sq km.
Satellite connections seem to be winning the race ahead of the kind of cheap wireless solution working in Herefordshire (see box, right).
Charles Trotman, senior rural business adviser at the CLA, says everyone acknowledges that getting a superfast broadband signal into rural areas will prove an economic benefit – but providing it looks as far away as ever.
“It does not make economic sense to lay fibre cables, providers will not take the risk. So it will be the responsibility of the customer to sort it out, which you can either do individually by satellite, or as a community by clubbing together to buy a connection,” he says.
“The cost of satellite is coming down – and the government is looking at a voucher scheme, so customers can buy the service themselves. The trouble is that the benchmark for superfast is going up to 30MB, which as yet nobody offers on satellite.”
Trotman suggests that until either the government offers more valuable vouchers, or somebody offers a benchmark satellite service, the scheme is not going anywhere.
Solving the problem of rural broadband is not easy – and it is going to take some time. So in the meantime, enjoy the view.
Broadband’s narrow options
Satellite or wireless connections are currently the only viable ways to connect the final 3% of very-hard-to-reach areas to broadband – but there could be other solutions, says specialist consultant Rob de Corday Long.
“Some radio spectrum has been released by the turn-off of analogue TV, so the band around 600MHz is going to be available. Sites using these frequencies could be spaced far apart and cover large areas, but it is still at an early stage,” he says.
“There is also so-called white space technology based on the guard bands between TV channels, needed in the old days to stop adjacent channels from interfering with each other.
“This space between channels can be utilised for rural broadband too. Big firms are looking at this – Google and Microsoft, for instance.”
Home-made broadband
Home-made jam, home-made chutney, how about home-made broadband? Rural England’s latest cottage industry is creating miniature internet service providers (ISPs).
Herefordshire is leading the way. A dispersed population in a county with only one city means all utilities face problems. Just 24% of North Herefordshire has superfast
broadband, and 14% struggle to reach 2MB. Much of the county falls squarely into the 3% of very-hard-to-reach areas with a housing density under 500 premises per sq km.
Lingen – with a population density of 183 sq ft and an appreciably lower housing density – claims to have the UK’s smallest ISP. Launched in 2009 with 30 subscribers, Lingen Community Broadband now has 95 home and business users receiving a 5MB-10MB wireless signal over about 60 square miles of hilly green countryside.
The volunteer-run ISP buys its signal from Airband, which beams it 24 miles from Hereford to a hill-top transmitter at Kinsham. The ISP then distributes the signal to eight other transmitters – and from them to receivers (the size of a paperback book) attached to users’ homes.
Chairman Steve Sanders says: “We have the capacity to go up to 30 or 40MB if we can justify the expense. About 40% of users are in business, including a pub, a school, several tourist places, lots of farms and two new anaerobic digesters, all of whom would struggle without us. I just wish the government would take notice of what we and other community providers are doing.”
