Two rural Lincolnshire villages to get fibre-to-the-home
Tuesday 01 June 2010 10:37:58 by John Hunt

Fibrestream are bringing fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) to two mystery rural villages in Lincolnshire, which have been identified as Ashby de la Launde and possibly Bloxhom by an ISPreview reader. In an interview with BBC Lincolnshire, Guy Jarvis of Fibrestream discussed their progress of getting the villages connected up and how much they expect things to cost.

Fibrestream are around two-thirds of the way there to getting enough interest from the villages which will allow them to proceed with the install. They are following a community led system which means the community have been at the forefront of getting this project going and their assistance will help keep costs down. Two options are available for deployment in the village. If there is a large amount of interest, a full fibre-to-the-home based system will be deployed connecting up each home by fibre optic cable. This is expected to cost around £150 to install (although cheaper if you are willing to help with the work by digging trenches for the cables) with an ongoing cost of around £20-£30 for the service a month. The second option is what they call FiWi- fibre delivered to a central point in the village and then distributed using Wireless to people who want to connect. The FiWi options works out cheaper to deploy, and any money raised over the cost of running the service will be reinvested to give people a direct fibre to the home (FTTH) connection. They are expecting to be able to deliver speeds of up to 100Mbps using FTTH.

It's good to see small villages taking the initiative to get high-speed broadband services deployed where they would otherwise be left off the map by the large broadband players. Other rural projects such as those from Rutland Telecom which include the Rural villages of Erbistock in Wales and Lyddington in Leicestershire should help to prove that you don't need to be a large national company to get fibre broadband rolling.