Last night we had our first community meeting for our project to deliver NGA in my community. The meeting was an eye opener to me for a number of reasons:
1. It is very difficult to persuade people to come out of their houses at 8pm on a dark autumn night!
2. Broadcasting a live event is not very easy at all and fails dramatically when you cannot get a connection at the event itself.
3. There are community members who are willing to step up, get involved and help drive the project
4. What I thought would excite the people about the project didn't
#4 was the biggest issue, of course. There was I expounding the services and applications: the entertainment services, the healthcare services, education services. I spoke of better and more reliable access, of symmetrical access, of the benefits to home-based businesses and home workers. All of which did not strike the chord I had hoped.
The interest was there, the questions kept coming. We spoke for more than 2 hours on the subject.
So what did the community want?
If it is cheaper than BT, more reliable than BT, and offers us telephony services so that we can completely remove BT from the equation (to the point of removing our fixed line service all together) then we are interested.
Well, reliability can be done: NGA (using fibre and wireless much as described in this related post: http://5tth.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-fiwi-matters-in-uk.html) is inherently more reliable than copper. Telephony can be done, and indeed greatly improved on through the use of wholesale consumer IP telephony solutions.
So to cost... I need to work that one through. Speed is not enough of a concern to want to pay more to go faster. The expectation is a reliable, fixed and low cost solution that means they don't need to concern themselves with how fast it is going. The question is how much will people be willing to pay?
Friday 23 October 2009
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did you tell them they can do away with sky dishes and save £30 a month?
ReplyDeleteI think the main thing you have picked up is that you can't promise the future until you can deliver a service. More wants more. Once they have tried a really good broadband connection such as a fibre one they will use it and find their own killer apps. One chap in our village was converted simply because he can go on the imperial war museum site from home. simple things.
Not everyone wants to stream video. The feed has to be upgradeable so that when the chap has had his fill of the museums and discovers he can download war films to watch the pipe can deliver. As community activists we have a certain amount of thinking to do. What we want is a futureproof network. We build it and they will come. So I would say put your money into the infrastructure, and buy capacity as and when they demand it. Let them pay for what they use. Grand words, and easier said than done, I know.
It has to be this way to be sustainable. If the community can't see a reason to pay for the infrastructure then a way round that is to involve the parish council. They can get funding at low interest until the network can expand enough to generate a return. The ROI initially is in the community, not the network.
Good luck.
We are doing the same here, slow job, raising awareness, and not helped in any way by a government with blinkers on who don't get IT.
But we will get there.
chris
I half-jokingly mentioned starting a campaign to a friend, who is self-employed and works from home, and she turned out to be quite keen to start up a kind of grass roots effort to improve the broadband where she lives. She's served by a telephone exchange placed mid-way between two villages, and has to survive on dial-up.
ReplyDeleteAnother local business served by the same telephone exchange wanted a new line for broadband and were told BT wanted £4000 to put it in. I don't know how that ended up, but it seems like if that amount of money is required, there must be a better solution.
So instead of targeting consumers, why not search out the local businesses in your area? Seems like they might be more ardent supporters of your cause.
Exellent - thank you for those thoughts. I am hoping to get further engagement through the Parish Council (they are aware of what we are doing but I have not had the chance to fully brief them yet). I have also got the backing of the local businesses who are indeed ardent supporters. Were it not for them this would be going nowhere! With them we have a chance to bring the rest of the community together and deliver a meaningful project.
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