UK Villagers start their own broadband company

You know what they say, if you want something done right then you have to do it yourself, and that’s exactly what the residents of a UK village has done about their Broadband connection.

British Telecom (BT) said they wouldn’t be able to deliver a decent speed of broadband to the 200 homes in the village of Lyddington so the go ahead community raised £37,000 themselves to launch Rutland Telecom which will offer speeds of up to 40 Mbps.

It’s all about money. The problem in rural communities is that it isn’t always cost effective for commercial companies to set up a broadband connection to reach all the homes.

Apparently there are around 2 and a half million homes in the UK who still cannot get internet connections speeds of more than a paltry 2Mbps.

In this day and age that’s nothing short of ridiculous, particularly when we consider how much we rely on the Internet for more and more government services as well as everything else in life.

So hats off to the villagers who set up Rutland Telecom, there was no stopping them once they learned that there really was nothing actually stopping them.

“We found that any company could do, on a smaller scale, what Carphone Warehouse has done and take over BT’s network” Dr David Lewis, managing director of Rutland Telecom told the BBC.

The villagers asked Openreach, which is a BT spin off company, to supply the fibre optic cable to a street cabinet in the village, and they established Rutland Telecom as a bona fide company.

“For the first time in UK telecommunications history the telephone lines of customers are completely cut off from the local BT exchange,” said Rutland Telecom director Mark Melluish.

BT were apparently delighted to help Rutland Telecom get off the ground and are hoping that they will allow other service providers to use their network too “otherwise there’s a risk of a local monopoly developing” BT Group Strategy Director Olivia Garfield told the BBC. Why does that make me laugh?

Anyway, Rutland Telecom are now making a name for themselves and around 40 other rural community groups have contacted them for advice on doing the same in their neighbourhood.

Power to the people as they say!