Today I’m taking us back to circa 2016 when a 20-year-old started his own iOS app development business in a village with broadband speeds of less than 2 Mbps (as long as it wasn’t raining).
Most people who live in rural England will know the pain of having a broadband connection that was not much better than a wet piece of string with tin cans strapped to each end. Those who experienced this know first-hand how essential a reliable broadband connection is, even back in 2016. Children couldn’t study at home (putting them on the back foot), young adults couldn’t wait to leave local communities for a better life, and families found it hard to stay connected when FaceTime wasn’t an option. Businesses were suffering too. Professionals had to spend money (and generate needless emissions) to get to offices when work could be done from home. Not one facet of the community escaped the impact of something those who lived in better-connected areas took for granted.
Something had to be done, so Hucklow Parish Community Broadband was brought to life (quickly rebranded to the much-catchier HucklowNet). The initial board was convened to discuss the matter of poor connections with the local government. This quickly and unsurprisingly led to frustration and no practical solutions. Personally, I spent months travelling to London to discuss the matter of “broadband provisioning in rural areas” with DCMS, among others. Again, this led to no action other than awarding the incumbent (BT) yet more cash for absolutely nothing.
It all looked to be a lost cause, then thankfully, the best office manager in existence happened to see an Openreach Engineer with his head down a manhole and his bum in the air. The joy was complete when we learned that he was installing FIBRE! We thought we would never see this day. You see, the Blair Government set out a target to connect all schools in the UK with a fibre broadband connection - quite a forward-thinking move. This meant that the local school in the village was getting fibre, resulting in a piece of connected fibre running straight through the centre of the village.
Then came the issues. BTNet (as it was then, now called “BT Local Business”) didn’t even know Openreach had fibre going past the Chapel (which would eventually house the central rack), so much that I had to spend hours on the phone convincing them the fibre was even there. It seemed every conceivable branch of local government wanted to halt the project, with several terse meetings with the local council. Finally, when talking to any commercial provider, big or small, we were let down by the lack of creativity or the level of spending needed to make anything a reality.
However, as any Engineer knows, constraints breed creativity. The six directors of the newly formed “HucklowNet LTD” set out a plan to build a fibre network connecting all homes (that wanted it) in the local area surrounding the village of Great Hucklow. The plan was to use as little public land as possible (cost-saving), keep things to the essentials only (simplify), rope in a lot of favours (community), and never take “no” for an answer (tenacity).
After lots of route design, digging (can’t thank anyone who dug enough), burying, talking, more planning, splicing, and spending later, we had our own local fibre internet network. This network provided symmetrical connections (much better than BT) and now provides packages up to 350 Mbps (but you can have more if needed, again much better than BT).
One stand-out item is that, as we have always wanted to minimise costs, we acquired tens of kilometres of ducting from an acquaintance, but none of us had ever seen tens of kilometres of ducting. When the lorry we had sent to pick it up arrived, we were all quite shocked at the scale of the thing! Through the process, I learnt how to splice fibre, a skill increasingly in demand, using the equipment we purchased from eBay, build and maintain a municipal internet network, run email servers, sit on a board of directors, and so much more.
The technology is based on second-hand commodity hardware (usually purchased from eBay) and has taught me a lot about mean time to failure, since we’re commonly on the receiving end of these. Despite all against us, the network has eight nines of uptime over the last 9 years, something BT has never achieved.
It will be HucklowNet’s 10th birthday this year, and we plan to have a big party inviting customers, shareholders, diggers, planners, and basically, all those who have contributed - plus their families.