Connecting the countryside

The internet has changed the way we socialise, shop and work the surges in internet connectivity have yet to reach many villages and farms in Warwickshire - even though the Goverment says the rural economy is a vital part of the recovery. a.

The Courier spoke to those campaigning for an improvement - and those trying to make it happen.

The pub landlord

WITH hand pumps, hearty meals and a cosy atmosphere, the Harvester pub in Long Itchington is not the place you expect to find demand for fast download speeds.

But for owner Simon Mills, high-speed broadband cannot come soon enough.

Even relaxing while sipping a pint of real ale has changed since the letters www entered common parlance. While they may be content to watch a pint settle, customers don’t want to wait for a website to load.

Mr Mills said: “People used to say ‘did you see this last night?’. Now they say ‘let me show you this that I saw last night’.”

Giving customers the Wi-Fi they demand is only one problem. Training videos are now available online, but with download speeds so slow, staff often spend longer waiting for buffering than watching the video.

Ordering stock should just be a matter of clicking a mouse, but Mr Mills says the painful process of uploading photographs or sending emails turns his job into a chore.

Mr Mills uses social media site twitter to promote the pub online and recently posed the results of a speed test showing he had a download speed of 4.3MB and an upload speed of only 0.7MMB per second.

Mr Mills said: “Coventry is the ninth largest city in the UK and we’re only eight miles from there, but we’re running at a very slow speed. There are places in Africa with faster internet than us.”

The start-up

MOVING to the countryside is not on the horizon for one Leamington start-up, whose owner found his connection was twice as fast at work as at home in Fenny Compton.

Danny Rughoobeer set up his PR and marketing company Red Marlin around two years ago. At first he ran the business from his home in Fenny Compton, but moved to Althorpe Street Enterprise Hub in Leamington some 18 months ago.

Running a test, he found he had download speeds of 12.37MB at his office compared with 5.8MB at home, and upload speeds of 0.96MB at work were almost three times faster than his 0.38MB speed at home.

Dealing with large picture files, and with clients around the UK, he said he would be reluctant to move back to the countryside now he has taken on new staff.

Mr Rughoobeer said: “I’m amazed by the difference in broadband speeds and it certainly would make me think twice about relocating our offices to a rural location in the future.”

The village where the future is a click away

ONE village looking forward to the day the pipes get bigger is Marton.

The village won BT’s Race to Infinity competition to be among the first to have superfast broadband last year after more than six in ten villagers voted to have high-speed internet.

The first cabinets will be installed in March, with fibre-optic cables running to homes in the village. Nearby Birdingbury, Princethorpe, Leamington Hastings and Weston-under-Wetherley will also benefit even with copper cables, because there will be fibre-optic cables running to cabinets in the street.

Resulting speeds mean people will be able to download a song in two seconds, an album in 30 seconds and a feature length high-definition film in ten minutes.

IT consultant Michael Koch was one of the people leading Marton’s bid. He said: “It’s going to make a big difference. I sometimes think people don’t realise what kind of scale this will be. It will go from the ridiculous to the sublime.”

Mr Koch describes the problem with current service as basic physics: copper telephone wires mean the further you are from the exchange the weaker the signal. Marton is relatively close to the exchange, so speeds during the day can be up to 6.5MB, but fall to 2.5MB or even 1MB in the evening.

Once fibre-optics are laid, the promise is for up to 40MB and later 80MB, 100MB and beyond, with the only bottleneck being the customer’s Wi-Fi.

With file-sharing, downloading films and video-conferencing made easy and the possibility of whole families being online at once in the evening, he predicts the improvement could even boost house prices.

He said: “There is a checklist if you’re a young professional and you’re contemplating moving to the countryside, and one of the items is what the internet speed is going to be like. That’s a mindset that’s already changed.”

Don’t ask, don’t get - bridging the rural-urban divide

THE more people who sign up for the benefits of high-speed broadband in the countryside, the faster they will come.

And once it is installed, we can only begin to imagine the ways the internet could still improve our lives.

This is the message from Warwickshire County Council’s e-business advisor Leigh Hunt, who says the key is to get the more efficient fibre-optic cables that snake everywhere in towns rolled out into the countryside.

The cost is high, but firms will invest if they believe they can make their money back.

Warwickshire has been allocated just over £4 million in government funding. The county council must match that and further money will come from the private sector.

Before they invest, private companies must see there is demand, so the county is urging people and companies to register online and show they want faster broadband.

She said: “The areas with the strongest response will get served first. We need to get as many people as possible to fill out the survey because we need to prove to the market that we have the demand.”

Ms Hunt describes the difference in service in terms of a rural-urban divide, with some areas struggling to get up to 0.5MB per second - the level of early broadband in the 1990s. The Government’s target is to reach a minimum of 2MB per second across the county and bring 90 per cent of people up to 24MB.

But Leigh believes it should be possible to make remote cottages or hamlets that are hard to reach by bus or train viable for someone wanting to run a business.

She said: “The exciting thing about this are the technologies we’re not using yet. For businesses, there is video-conferencing, so you don’t need to travel. It’s things like being able to work from home, that gives companies lower costs and staff a better quality of life.”

It’s not just business. Rural internet could bring a higher quality of life and even keep elderly and vulnerable people independent for longer.

Ms Hunt added: “It’s being able to control your domestic heating from work, set ovens or record television programmes. Your computer will be able to monitor your health and you’ll be able to speak to a doctor or nurse without having to leave the house.

“It’s all that stuff that not so long ago you would have thought of as science fiction but are perfectly able to do.”

• Click on the links below to register your interest.