Alternative options for a Hampshire village

Hi,

Here in a small village in Hampshire, our only option of getting anything over 5-6Mps is to fund our own solution. We've received two quotes from BT to perform this work, but due to the costs, adding a single cabinet at the beginning of the lane is the only viable option. Even then, it'll cost each of us around £1500 per household to get 25Mbps.

We've struck a rather sore point with the local estate managers, in that they are likely to insist on an additional fee for us to put the cabinet on the shared land - something that hasn't gone down well with the community as it's seen as pure blackmail.

I would like to start investigating other alternatives than fibre, particularly wireless ones that would not have the same issues as above.

We have little to no 3G/4G connection for mobile phones, so that isn't really an option (plus the unlimited data cost of 4G would be prohibitive at the moment).
I've looked into a microwave links but it appears line of sight is needed and we're in a slight dip which might be difficult.

What else can I be looking into?

People like Gigaclear, but wayleaves may be an issue once again.

Presume the local estate (rather than a friendly local farmer who also wants broadband) own the higher land around the village, so there's no obvious location for a repeater site 'down' to the village using a wireless solution?

Don't suppose Call Flow are interested in total one-offs, but have you tried them? They've been delivering an FTTC solution in Kent, and perhaps more relevant, near Alresford, Hants, under Govt funding looking at delivering to the final few %. May be able to do something cheaper than BT?

Presume despite your username it's not Beaulieu itself you're talking about - Boldre perhaps? - as HCC/BDUK were looking for cabinet sites there - see here - I assumed they were going ahead with upgrades for these areas, and the HCC Superfast Broadband Programme map implies this - or did they change their mind/fail to find a location?

In reply to a post by olicuk:

Presume despite your username it's not Beaulieu itself you're talking about - Boldre perhaps?

Odd. I would expect the username to be Boldre in that case.

Tthe Hampshire Superfast Broadband map shows Beaulieu covered by the programme, hence the question... though from the New Forest page on their website and historical versions of it on the Wayback Machine, this was due to be delivered late in March 2015, and now says it will be delivered late by Apr 16. Codelook doesn't however list any cabs for Beaulieu so not really sure what the situation is.

How many properties is the £1,500 per property for and how many people do you expect to sign up for a 25 Mbps service? There are substantial fixed costs for any local network, whether wireless or anything else. If you are only talking about 20 properties you will be lucky to get a wireless solution to work. The problem is the operating cost for backhaul - getting the traffic to the outside world.

A single mast and some repeaters should cost less than £30K but a leased line for backhaul plus transit is likely to cost you up to £40 per month (including VAT) for that alone - and that will involve a 3 year commitment. The whole thing would be much more viable if you are dealing with 50 users. The increase in capital cost would be small by comparison with spreading the operating cost over a larger number of connections.

The alternative to a leased line is a set of bonded FTTC business lines. Relying on 2-3 of them would bring the monthly cost down to a manageable level for a small wireless system. That will work if you can get access to 80/20 FTTC somewhere with a line of sight to your main wireless mast.

A final word of warning. Despite what you may hear, lots of people are perfectly happy with 5-6 Mbps for now and won't pay significantly more for 20+ Mbps. The main market for wireless systems consists of communities and/or users who get less than 2 Mbps. Even if there are 50 properties, you may struggle to get 20 to commit to the service in advance.

Curious who you represent In the road in question ?

It's for a part of Beaulieu that isn't being connected to the fibre that is currently being rolled out. The fibre will go passed the end of the lane where we could pick it up from, but they are not updating our cabinets and have no plans to.

I represent all the residents on the lane, about 39 houses in total.

Thanks for the heads up on CallFlow. I had a read of their site and it looks like they would be ideal, but for the fact they're minimum number of houses is around 100 to make it financially viable, and we're around 25. I'll give them a call though.