Project Computers

17 March 2006

Penny Ward and Colin Balkham, of Project Computers in Luxborough on Exmoor, were unable to receive broadband as their business was too far from the telephone exchange. Their solution was to invest in a wireless network, with their broadband delivered via transmitters on masts in Taunton and Elworthy.  Their 2mb symettrical service has been so successful that a further 26 homes and businesses in their village have joined their network

Video Transcript

Project Computer’s primary business is providing archival and data mining software and associated services to corporate clients, a lot of them financial, across the world.

The main problem for project computers was that we became very frustrated and we were wasting a lot of time trying to keep up our service levels to our clients.  Their worldwide and they’re using high speed links themselves, and we were beginning to think we would have to move the business back to the south east if we were to continue to expand and maintain our client base.  If we wanted to stay in Somerset, which is a place where we love living, we had to get broadband.  Somerset’s terrific, it’s where we want to walk the dogs, we can enjoy the joys of Exmoor, but without broadband we didn’t have a chance. 

The three options for broadband were ADSL, satellite and wireless.  ADSL simply isn’t going to be available here – we’re too far from the exchange, satellite is both expensive and has problems such as latency, the ideal solution, and the one we’ve ended up with is wireless.  It’s fast, it’s symmetrical and it’s cost effective.  The speed we’re now receiving is 2Meg symmetrical, which is about 50 times faster than the dial-up we had previously.  In order to get broadband to our remote office we had to invest about £4000 and we pay something less than £50 a month for the service.  But we do expect to get a return on the investment within a 12 month period. 

Broadband goes via an underground fibre optic cable as far as Surf Telecoms, in Prior’s Wood in Taunton which transmits to the Elworthy mast high up on top of the Brendans, facing Exmoor.  We’ve had some new aerials put up, one is on that Elworthy mast and the other one is on a little pole up at the top of the hill, 600 metres up from the office.  That’s a whole 7 miles away from Elworthy. 

“And the white dish you see behind me is the penultimate link in the chain.  It takes the signal from the mast at Elworthy and feeds it down into the fibre optic cable.  We got it the last 600 metres with a good deal of help from the local farming community.  We had one of them who dug us a trench down three fields, we then had another pair of them up there with a tractor, helping us lay power cables.  We then laid the fibre optic cables ourselves which involved shoving it down a drainage pipe and dragging it down the trench.  And this is how we did it.  Standard drainage pipe from the local agricultural supplier, buried 3 feet down, pull the fibre optic through, it’s the ultimate step in DIY broadband!”

My advice to other businesses in rural areas who want broadband and need it, is firstly to make a lot of noise, talk to your council, talk to your neighbours, and other local businesses, see if you can build up a storm.  And the second thing is don’t give up, find out as much as you possibly can, because it’s highly likely that you won’t simply be able to go to a supplier and say, “please can I have one”, you may have to climb a ladder, get into a trench, or at least get your hands dirty!

Most of the time we’ve had broadband it’s been a wonderful service, but we did have one major outage.  One Sunday morning we discovered we had no broadband at all and on investigation we discovered that the fibre optic had come away from its drainage pipe where it emerged from the earth and appeared to have been munched by a cow!  End of broadband! 

We think that the broadband service we’ve invested in could be hugely useful to other businesses in the community.  One of the reasons we got involved in the Broadband for Exmoor campaign is that we sincerely believe that it’s vital to the economic lifeblood of areas like this, that we have this kind of infrastructure. 

Once people realised broadband was actually available in the village, and the huge benefit it was, they suddenly have been coming along in droves, BT have finally realised that can’t make that last mile so now through the use of wireless relay points like this, we are enabling the last of 19 users to cover the whole of the village of Luxborough. 

“It’s worth all we’ve been through with broadband, all the hassle, just to be able to stay in this place, isn’t it?”

“Gets my vote every time.”

www.pcl-online.org