Another UK local community is setting up their own wireless network – and hats off to them.
96 households in Denham, Buckinghamshire had already registered their interest with BT in ADSL-enabling their local exchange but as BT the minimum required that had been set was 450, they fell well short.
Not seeing this as the end of the boad; two of them decided to set up Denham Broadband to provide wireless access around the area. Subscribers will receive ADSL-like speeds via a small, rooftop antenna, all for an estimated setup cost of 150 UKP plus 30UKP a month.
It’s going to be interesting to see if this people-power action will mean that other will go to these lengths to live The Broadband Dream.
The figures in the UK still don’t look great. In the current BT ADSL Demand Tracker only five of the 2323 listed have been converted, and of these 2323, more than ¾ of these exchanges haven’t even had a trigger level set yet.
At the end of the table, they’ve been kind enough to not order it the by number of households signed in an exchange. To some of these people where none of their neighbours are interested in ADSL like the Bod in Onich (North west of Glasgow, Scotland), The Broadband Dream must feel a long way off.
I tell you what would be interesting – installing a large number of Denham Broadband-type community networks across the country, as consume.net have been discussing for a long while.
Then sell the subscribers SIP phones (normal phone handsets that can use the Internet to carry the calls) and give them the benefit of making close-to-free phone calls to other subscribers. If enough people and especially businesses subscribed, it could start to hit BT’s cashflow.