How Wray Village worked with the University of Lancaster to get broadband accessChange ManagementAlthough it only has 500 residents, Wray is very people-driven – if a small group of people want to do something, they will get together, form a group and achieve it. The people of Wray were becoming increasingly aware of their need to have broadband and so they joined together in 2003 to create Wray Broadband Group to explore the possibilities of bringing broadband to the village. The group started with 17 members, from a variety of ages, and with differing time commitments. As the community weren’t connected to the internet, the group operated through word of mouth, meetings, and putting up posters to keep people informed. It got hands-on support from the Network Research & Special Projects (NRSP) Unit to help it begin organising. The group found out from British Telecom (BT) that, if 250 local people expressed an interest in getting broadband, the company would enable the Hornby telephone exchange. This would mean all villages in the surrounding area, such as Wray, could get broadband. Due to the high levels of community organisation in Wray, this threshold was exceeded quickly. However, the BT solution of providing a high-speed connection through DSL and ADSL broadband risked the village being left behind again, since internet speed is determined by the users’ distance from their nearest telephone exchange. This means that the closer you are, the higher your potential broadband speed - but users who are even 5 km away from the exchange experience extremely slow speeds. While the village has a relatively densely populated core, it also has a lot of outlying dwellings, hamlets and farms – this meant that most people in Wray were around 7 or more kms from their nearest telephone exchange, in digital ‘black spots’. The problem of having broadband but at an inferior bandwidth and speed, encouraged the Wray community to look for alternative solutions. It had become aware of a research project at Lancaster University to bring a large broadband network connecting all schools in Lancashire and Cumbria together. So Wray villagers decided to approach the university to see if it could help them overcome their broadband problems. Following a successful village meeting in early 2004 between the university and a hundred members of the community, the decision was made to start the Wray Broadband Project. The university’s special project unit felt the project represented a great opportunity to create a live network testbed – building a real network with real people to test the work done in labs on network research and to look at how such a network performs in reality. Wray community’s high levels of motivation and engagement made it a strong candidate as a partner which could help create a network that would deliver the benefits of broadband to the village. To overcome the problem of connectivity dissipating over distance, the university suggested that the village used Wireless Mesh Network, a research technology being developed at the time. Lancaster City Council gave the community a £5,000 grant to help acquire the necessary equipment for the end users and to get early adopters online. Together with the core infrastructure which the university provided, this got many homes online that wouldn’t have subscribed to an ‘ordinary’ broadband connection. It was like a ‘free taster’... It worked, and at one point 180 users were on the system. What’s different about Mesh? Traditional wireless access is based around an access point that has a certain range of coverage, outside of which there is no access. Mesh Networks allows a community that has one access point to add additional mesh routers to communicate with the original access point, so that ubiquitous high speed coverage can be built up over a wider range. This technology was regarded as suitable for communities such as Wray, because Mesh Networks were seen as self-organising and self-managing, and resilient to failure. They also represent low cost technology with a starting cost of around £2,000 for the project (1 mesh box costs £250). The deployment of this Mesh technology in Wray began in 2004. At the local school a contractor was hired to install three antennae. In total three mesh boxes were installed at the school (in the centre of the village), and a further three were installed at the edges of the village. The diagram shows how wireless connection is transmitted from the boxes at the school and extended to other points in the village creating a wider area of connectivity.  During this deployment phase, the community had to overcome early technical niggles to create an efficient and resilient internet network. Throughout this process the Wray Broadband Group was in practice the delivery group, with its members acting as the network’s technical support team, due to their commitment to the project. As a result the group set itself up as a charity named ‘WrayComCom’ (Wray Community Communications). During this period the Wray Broadband Community met every fortnight, discussing progress on the project, and also passing on to each other lessons learnt on using the internet and the Mesh network effectively. Projects undertaken have included:
In an effort to highlight what is possible for communities with high capacity, Wray village streamed a village cricket match online – a world first! Wray is not a community that stands still. It is currently part of the B4RN initiative to build a fibre network to help local farmers to get high speed internet connections and indirectly to build one of the best networks in the world (www.b4rn.org.uk) You can see the full film of the inaugural dig here: http://b4rn.org.uk/north-lancashire-residents-make-broadband-history |
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 Frankie Hine-Hughes wrote this case study for Governance International on 16 April 2012. |
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