MOBILE ▶▶▶ UK
Farmer’s wife helps get UK rural community connected BY LOUISE IMPEY
The UK is much more densely populated than either Canada or Australia, but its growers still face the challenge of poor or non-existent broadband connections. The North West is particularly affected and
this prompted a digital revolution in the Lune Valley in Lancashire over the past eight years. Farmer’s wife Chris Conder took matters into
her own hands to provide a neighbouring farm with broadband. Known locally as the farmer who built her own broadband, Chris came up with a DIY
solution to a neighbour’s internet connectivity problems caused by trees getting in the way of a wireless mast. Unimpressed with dial-up and unreliable
satellites, and with no other alternatives available in the area, she dug a trench with an excavator and managed to lay down 1km (0.6 miles) of fibre optic cable to the farm. Once the cable was lit, the two farms were
connected, allowing the next door property to make use of the internet. This proved to Chris that the local
community could do it – provided they were prepared to put in the hard work and do some of the installation themselves. That was the start of B4RN, which was
founded in 2011, and has become an internet service provider offering much faster broadband speeds than the average UK connection.
Co-operative model A community initiative, it originally set out to bring self-installation fibre broadband to eight parishes, with funding provided by locals through a co-operative model. The bulk of the work was done by
volunteers, with local farmers and landowners giving access to their land and relevant equipment. Today, it has laid more than 3,200km (2,000 miles) of cable and connected 40 parishes with internet speeds as high as 1Gbps. Each household pays $53/month with a
The community initiave has laid more than 3,200km of cables to improve rural broadband 42 ▶ FUTURE FARMING | 9 November 2017
$264 connection fee. Larger businesses have to pay more, while the service is free for churches and provided to village schools at a discount price. Chris points out that the B4RN model has been successful because it operates in rural areas, where there is no need to get permission to dig through roads or incur the costs that landowners can charge for cabling to take place. “Local farmers have been supportive, which means the whole community has benefited,” she says. “No one is making a profit at their expense and we have all helped each other.”
EDWARD NORTH/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
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