News - Page 2 of 4 - FibreValley

FibreValley Kids

Posted on December 7, 2013 by Editor Posted in News Leave a comment

Children in the upper Worth Valley were able to express their frustrations relating to poor broadband and patchy mobile signals at a meeting organised by FibreValley, the group set up to campaign for better digital connectivity in the area. Milly, 9, from Stanbury Village School explained that the ‘Learn Anywhere’ platform on her school’s network wasn’t very useful from home because her Internet was too slow and kept cutting off. She would often have to plan to do her homework at school or at a friends house. Donna Craven and son Dale from Oakbank School explained how they have to go to Dale’s auntie’s house to get online, “It is just not reliable at home. I would love to be able to shop online or book a holiday from our home computer but it is not possible,” explained Donna. When asked what he wanted to do if he was able

Rural Scheme Winding Up – Sorry State of Affairs!

Posted on December 2, 2013 by Editor Posted in News Leave a comment

Post by Juliette Garside, telecoms correspondent First appeared in The Guardian, Sunday 1 December 2013 19.47 GMT The £20m rural community broadband fund is to be wound down in March next year with just a fraction of the money spent. Nestled around the remnants of a medieval stone cross, the hamlet of Dean in the heart of the Cotswolds can hardly be said to have entered the digital age. But there is at least one house that boasts a modern, superfast internet connection. The prime minister’s constituency home has a line leased by the Home Office from BT. His neighbours make do with the grindingly slow copper broadband network, and now their hopes of an upgrade have been dashed. Despite behind-the-scenes support from David Cameron and the more overt backing of his culture secretary, Maria Miller, a project designed to bring fibre connections to every home in Dean, and a total of 1,300 premises in west Oxfordshire,

No Superfast Broadband

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Editor Posted in News Leave a comment

New speed test data from independent price comparison and switching service, uSwitch.com, reveals not a single UK town or city is super-fast yet when it comes to broadband. The fastest urban area for broadband is Telford in Shropshire, but even here, average download speeds of 23Mbps still fall short of the super-fast minimum speed of 24Mbps. The speed test data – collected from broadband users in the 50 biggest UK cities and towns – shows that Belfast is the only capital city with average speeds above 20Mbps. Even London, the financial capital of the world, is trailing behind what the Government classes as super-fast, with average download speeds of 17Mbps. Shockingly, almost a fifth of broadband users in London (19%) are getting speeds of less than 3Mbps. It would take almost six hours to download a BluRay film at this speed. And although the average download speed across the whole of Britain

Keighley Broadband Campaign

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Editor Posted in News Leave a comment

10:00am Thursday 17th October 2013 in News By Miran Rahman Hundreds of Worth Valley residents are struggling with an inadequate or non-existent broadband service, according to a local expert. Now they are being asked to enlist in a campaign lobbying for a chunk of the £23.9 million on offer to be spent locally to combat the problem. The offensive against ‘digital exclusion’ is being spearheaded by not-for-profit group Fibre Valley, led by Oxenhope resident Ken Eastwood. He said despite improvements in central parts of some villages, people living in peripheral Worth Valley areas still endure a shockingly poor service. “Some people tell us they can’t get online at all,” he added. “Rural communities and businesses deserve to benefit from the same broadband our urban counterparts take for granted. We’re trying to mobilise as many people as possible to say this is something that really matters to them in the

Poster

Posted on September 30, 2013 by Editor Posted in News Leave a comment

Download a copy of our promotional poster. We need as many people as possible to sign-up if we are going to have influence over the £21.96m Superfast West Yorkshire programme. Click on the image to download an A4 pdf poster (9.6Mb).

Broadband from the Bell Tower

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Editor Posted in News Leave a comment

St Andrew's church in Paull, East Yorkshire, which has a new community broadband provision. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

Reproduced from The Guardian, Sunday 29 September 2013 16.34 BST It was 4am on Thursday when Paull Taylor turned on BBC News to be greeted with a BT spokesman making grand promises about superfast broadband in rural areas. The telecoms man was insisting his firm had not “exploited” £1.2bn of public funds – an accusation made by the Public Accounts Committee this week – and promising that most country-dwelling Britons would receive 2MB broadband by 2015. Despite the early hour, the 20-year-old electrician was lucid enough to provide a pithy response: “Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. He said the process was ‘transparent’. ‘Thoroughly transparent’. And yet we ask them whether they’re going to get a cable to our house and they reply saying ‘oh, we can’t tell you’. Anyway, two megs is rubbish. Absolutely naff. Meaningless. You can’t do anything with two megs.” Paull and his family live by a creek in the reclaimed marshland of Holderness, East Yorkshire, 10 miles south-east of

Discussion at EU Level

Posted on September 23, 2013 by Editor Posted in News Leave a comment

Sharing details of this event as an insight into discussions taking place in the EU The Fibre To The Home (FTTH) Council Europe is organising a FTTH Investors Day on 2 October 2013 in Brussels. Europe needs to make large network investments to create future-proof broadband networks. Is there a business case that works for FTTH networks? Where will the finance come from? What needs to be done to facilitate capital inflows to build the sector? How is Europe positioned? Does the Digital Single Market move Europe in the right direction? Discussion topics will include: Why FTTH is necessary to keep Europe competitive on a global scale Enabling an industry structure that can attract and absorb finance How fibre networks can be financed (even in rural areas) What role for policy makers The changing role of investors, banks, and operators in FTTH investment projects The risks for operators of choosing

Superfast West Yorkshire

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Editor Posted in News Leave a comment

Superfast West Yorkshire – £21.9 million to enhance broadband Official Press Release A new £21.96 million contract between the four West Yorkshire local authorities and BT has been agreed to transform broadband speeds across West Yorkshire by the end of Autumn 2015. The new project, “Superfast West Yorkshire” plans to extend high-speed fibre broadband to 97 per cent of households and businesses across the majority of West Yorkshire. As well as providing high speed fibre, the partnership aims to upgrade 100 per cent of premises in this area to speeds of more than 2Mbps. [FibreValley – can’t wait to see you do that in remotest upland areas, currently with no broadband or mobile signal]. Superfast West Yorkshire builds on BT’s commercial investment of £2.5 billion to roll fibre broadband out to two-thirds of UK premises by the end of Spring 2014. Leeds City Council, Bradford Metropolitan District Council, Wakefield Council

Delivering Promises

Posted on June 26, 2013 by Editor Posted in News Leave a comment

In 2009, the Labour government promised that everyone in the UK would get a minimum 2Mbps broadband service by 2012. Under the coalition government, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt said that wasn’t good enough and promised that Britain would have the best superfast broadband network in Europe – by 2015. To address market failings and ensure that rural communities were not left behind, £530m was allocated from the licence fee and Broadband UK (BDUK) set up to administer the fund. The intention was to allow communities and their local authorities to put together bids and for the key suppliers to compete for the lucrative contracts. Reasonable intentions perhaps – but in reality this has been a bureaucratic nightmare that to date has largely failed to deliver. 16 out of the 41 designated areas have yet to appoint a contractor and many of the projects won’t be completed by 2015. A process designed to encourage

Baroness Lane-Fox

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Editor Posted in News Leave a comment

GoOn UK Chair and UK Digital Champion, Baroness Lane-Fox, making her maiden speech in the House of Lords, extolling the virtues of the Internet and making the case for investment in infrastructure and skills for a truly digital Britain.