Background
We are a community of 66 properties on the east coast of Scotland in rural Aberdeenshire. I, like many of the villagers were frustrated by our broadband internet connections. The basic problem was that we were up to 2.5km from the nearest fibre exchange connected by copper cables to our homes. This meant that regardless of which company was providing our internet, the best anyone could get was around 8 mbps for a heavily impacted VDSL service but speeds as slow as 1 mbps were not uncommon, slower still if it was raining.
We felt like being in a forgotten backwater, 10 minutes drive to the bustling city of Aberdeen, with an internet connection unfit for the requirements of the 21st century. A Scottish Government programme to roll out superfast broadband to 95% of households in the country was just winding up as we made enquiries in 2019, and guess what, we were in the 5%.
With domestic requirements for ever-faster internet connections expanding year on year, we knew that catching up with fibre to the cabinet connections would not be enough; we needed to go a step beyond to the internet speeds of fibre to the premises (FTTP), given the apparent difficulty in rolling out infrastructure upgrades to a village of our size. For the fastest domestic internet connections, you need fibre-optic cable all of the way to your house with no copper cabling.
We consulted with our member of the Scottish Parliament, Maureen Watt, who updated us on the next phase of improvements. Contracts were being tendered and negotiated for their Reaching 100 programme (R100) to the remaining homes, but this would likely be a drawn-out programme and potentially only allow us fibre to the cabinet speeds at best. She suggested that we consider a Community Fibre Partnership with Openreach.
Community Fibre Partnership
The principle is that a community requests full FTTP connection from Openreach. The company, which provides the infrastructure for cabled communications matches funding to government Gigabit Vouchers obtained by each householder and business in the community. There are different rates depending on whether you live in what is classed as a rural area and whether your property is used to run a business or not. The definition of a business is quite loose; either a sole trader who can demonstrate through invoices or similar that they trade from the address under question, or a small to medium enterprise where business can be demonstrated to take place from the house. We were classed as being in an Accessible Rural area and at the time of our application, each householder could raise a Gigabit Voucher for up to £1500 and each business for up to £3500. Note that the information on the Gigabit Voucher web site is not accurate in its definition of businesses - more information is contained in the individual contracts.
The conditions attached to being eligible for a Gigabit Voucher are that each householder commits to upgrading their current broadband contract to a higher speed when the works are completed. The rule for rural communities is a commitment to upgrade to at least 30 MBPS (Superfast) contract, but is more onerous in non-rural localities where a greater commitment might be required. For us, where our broadband connection was so poor, the decision was simple - if, on completion of the works, you would be prepared to upgrade to a superfast broadband package from our original VDSL service, then it would be easy to meet this requirement. After all, why would you want to pay almost as much (and for some internet service providers, the same amount) for such a poor VDSL or ADSL service.
We went through a drawn-out process of contract negotiation. Quite a bit of this delay was sorting out which houses to include and which to exclude. We needed to get the scope right - should we include houses near enough to the exchange to get a superfast broadband connection or not? Other issues arose from Openreach's database of properties in the village was inaccurate and we had to go through a jumbled list with a toothcomb to ensure nobody was missed out. By now, the Covid 19 outbreak was slowing progress and it seemed to take an age to reach an agreed quote. My advice to anyone else doing this would be to get the geographical spread of the scheme right at the outset, don't exclude anyone just because you know the house is empty or they don't use the internet. Set your scope and stick to it. Every time we went back to Openreach for a new quote, the price per household seemed to increase. I never got a satisfactory answer from Openreach as to why this was (Maureen Watt also went to the Director for Scotland of Openreach on our behalf with a similar result). So the fewer quotes you request, the better and faster it will be.
In Old Portlethen, there were 66 houses in the scheme and 40 of these signed up for vouchers, of which eight were businesses; this comfortably exceeded the amount that we needed to generate. It wasn't easy to generate this number. Steve Lewis and I knocked on a lot of doors to persuade the reluctant. Some people in the village only use the internet for emails and web browsing and didn't see the point of faster broadband, others were moving away, the house was empty or a multitude of other valid reasons. Conversely, some knew that they didn't need the capability of FTTP broadband, but are so invested in the village and what we were trying to do, that they signed up anyway. Bless them. We put leaflets through peoples' doors, but it was face to face contact that did the trick.
The final step was to put forward a business to enter into the contract with Openreach on behalf of the community. We could have put forward a number of businesses, but on reading the contract, it was clear that this business would be responsible for any financial shortfall at the end of the scheme. Each household that obtained a Gigabit Voucher has 12 months to sign up for an enhanced service. If they don't do so in that time, this could annul the voucher leaving a shortfall in the contract cost has to be met. For us, this was likely to be low risk, but the company of which I am Managing Director, HiDef Aerial Surveying Limited, was prepared to sign the contract and meet any shortfall in the unlikely event of the partnership falling short.
Once the contract was signed, each householder was contacted by the Gigabit Voucher scheme and asked to agree to the terms of the scheme. The contract looked more onerous than it was - quite a bit of information referred to the conditions of the normal scheme, but refers to the terms for rural projects in an annex. These over-rode all the more onerous conditions of non-rural locations, particularly the issue around the upgrade speeds required for voucher holders.
FTTP installation
There are other web sites that describe this process e.g. Oliver Jobson's excellent account. I'll describe what happened here. I finally signed the contract with Openreach on 1 September 2020. I was warned not to expect much to happen and that they would probably need the full year to complete the connection. There is a reason why I knew it would not take longer than this - the Gigabit Vouchers expire after 12 months and you cannot apply again if you run over this date.
We went through the second COVID 19 lockdown at the start of 2021. People in the village had to work from home or kids had to do home schooling, all using a broadband service which was not fit for Zoom or Teams meetings. I found myself having to hold important client video conferences in which I had to switch off my camera and microphone until I needed to speak and it was difficult to make out what people were saying. During the lockdowns, far greater pressure was placed on the national network and most people experienced a drop in internet performance. For people with superfast broadband, a 3-4 mbps drop in performance is probably not going to make much difference apart from slightly slower streaming and download, but for a village on 1 - 8 mbps, this can be catastrophic. The village WhatsApp group contained frequent desperate messages from people whose internet had stopped working at a critical point in their working day. As someone who lived at the top of the village, I was able to get an OK 4G signal and set up a mobile Wi-Fi I could use for work, but people at the bottom of the village could not get this at all. My pleas to Openreach to speed up the roll-out were frustrating - I just got radio silence. I'm sure they were being overwhelmed with similar desperate pleas.
In the build up to the works commencing, there were a number of small jobs that took place along the route to the village, but work began in anger at the end of May 2021, with sub-contractors digging along the narrow road to the village. They had to put in extra telegraph poles to get around difficult areas where digging wasn't possible and a couple of extra poles in the village. In general, digging is expensive and not Openreach's preferred option. It would seem that in the village, there were lots of snags to be overcome. The copper cables were buried under the road un-ducted and led to telegraph poles. This meant making greater use of the telegraph poles and less of digging into properties. About 20 properties had cables dug to a Customer Splice Point (CSP) on the property and the remainder in effect have their splice point on the telegraph pole. Other issues arose from ownership of common areas and obtaining permission to dig trenches to that point.
There were one or two moans from villagers, but fewer than there could have been. Everyone knew the importance of ensuring that the project went ahead smoothly. I met the project manager in May, and having direct contact helped. There is a WhatsApp group for the village and I set up a dedicated email address to send out communication to let people know what was happening and direct Openreach to any outstanding snags. For Openreach, it meant fewer questions and support with land access when needed by having that point of contact.
Openreach decided to include a few houses that fell outside the partnership in their work programme at their own cost, or use another grant. At the end of the day, this was Openreach's decision to make and I could not expect them to make this offering, but I'm very glad that they did.
The final connection
The FTTP for all the villagers went live on 23 July 2021. We found out by self-discovery and an email from the project manager, followed eventually by a leaflet informing on what happened next and it was possible on various broadband facility checking websites to see that addresses in the village could upgrade their internet to speeds up to 1 gbps. In reality, you will only be able to order an average download speed of up to 900 mbps and upload of up to 100 mbps. It was interesting that some websites didn't refresh their database as quickly as others.
The final stage for everyone was to contact their broadband provider (or if they were out of contract, to a new provider) and request an upgrade. Switching from the old copper VDSL or ADSL system is not trivial, but requires an engineer to visit the property to discuss the routing of the fibre to an Optical Network Terminator (ONT) box inside your house. This either comes from a CSP or direct from the telegraph pole, which uses existing routes into the house. Your ONT needs to be situated close to an electric power socket. The WiFi router provided by the internet service provider connects to the ONT, these factors need to be considered when speaking with the internet service provider's engineer. In my case, it was quite an effort to convince my broadband provider (Vodafone) that my connection was now live. I got him to check the BT wholesale broadband checker and said I wanted to switch providers and this seemed to do the trick and my connection was showing live on their system.
Because the works took so long, we were left with very little time to order our upgrades. However, at this time, the government a 6-month extension has been granted which gives people more time before their vouchers expire. And they needed that time too - some folks were being made some ludicrous upgrade proposals. EE, for example, told one villager that she was only allowed to upgrade to a 900 mbps service at a significant cost. Given she only uses her broadband for emails and occasional browsing is completely inappropriate. She called back and they 'discovered' they could offer her 100 mbps. She's holding out for 36 mbps.
It's important that before people sign up for their vouchers that people check their broadband contract from their supplier. Consider when the contract is due to expire, what it will cost to upgrade, consider how much the early termination fee will be if they want to change supplier.
I went for a download speed of 200 mbps and Vodafone completed the works on 10 August 2021. However, after 3 hours it went down. It would appear that another engineer disconnected me and it took three days to get the problem sorted, once I'd persuaded Vodafone that the break was more than line testing interruption. 200 mbps is probably more than I need, but I wanted to be able to enjoy real-time synchronisation with cloud computing systems and to be able to cope with multiple users in the house all trying to stream content at the same time. For my work, I sometimes need to look at extreme high resolution video (16X HD format), so this should do the trick.
Current grant schemes
The Gigabit Voucher scheme is still in operation in 2021 and you should be able to use this scheme to part-fund (or as in our case, fully-fund) getting full fibre to the premises for your community. It works best for rural communities, but is available to any community. What is tending to happen is that companies are using these to pull together projects, mainly in towns and cities, where commercial roll-out is more economically viable. Something to watch out for with these projects is that to qualify for a gigabit voucher, you might have to commit to upgrade your broadband contract to a much faster connection speed than you really need or desire (up to twice your current speed). We used Openreach because they were the only company prepared to deliver this project (so much for competition), but you could use any company to deliver to your community and the Gigabit Voucher web site provides a long list of potential contractors.
Another potential funding route in Scotland is the Scottish Broadband Voucher scheme, which has been made available under the Reaching 100 programme. This offers one-off grants of up to £5,000 per property which can potentially be combined with the Gigabit Vouchers from the UK Government (i.e. up to £8,500).
Postscript
Living in the village provided us with an outstanding quality of life - space, clean air, beautiful views and walks beside the sea and a popular village pub, but we had lousy internet. Now we can all enjoy stable very fast broadband facilities in the village. For many householders and businesses, video conferencing and remote computing are essential for home working. I hope we don't have to go back to home schooling, but that requires good internet access for teaching staff and children alike. More house buyers are seeking more space to accommodate home working and schooling, driving a surge in house prices in the UK, but decent broadband is also a critical factor.
