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Lyddington Fast
Broadband "part of the land that Digital Britain forgot" Observer 3/5/09 We will be providing Lyddington with faster broadband, telephone and TV services. This entails installing our own equipment in a street cabinet in the village, next to the existing green BT passive cabinet. This means the current long runs of copper from premises in Lyddington back to Uppingham BT exchange (Stockerston Road) will be reduced dramatically to the distance from our village cabinet to each house in Lyddington. Phone calls will be delivered over our network and customers can retain their existing number.
The capital costs of installing a cabinet are very high - hence the level of indicative responses that were required to convince us (and our local small investors) that this was a viable option. Residents raised £25,000 for Rutland Telecom to deliver this solution. Speeds up to 40Mbps (100x faster than most Lyddington residents are getting now) and greater reliability should be expected. Future-proofing comes with the possibility that lines can be bonded to achieve higher speeds or services could be delivered via Fibre to the Home (FTTH) as is increasingly the case in Japan, Norway USA etc. Lyddington is in something of a mobile-reception black hole so we are keen to improve this by offering mobile calls over our network. Residents will be able to get excellent mobile network coverage from our router in their home. Enquiries from potential customers in other rural locations see here. Press/PR/Media enquires to Rupert Warwick
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Pre-registered customers - please proceed
with final signup to begin the transfer to fast
broadband Timeline David Lewis & Mark Melluish, the founders of Rutland Telecom, began formulating ideas about subloop unbundling early in 2007. Lyddington was to be the testbed of a wider strategy of fulfilling their business plan to make Next Generation Broadband available to all premises in Rutland. There was a presentation for all Lyddington residents, in the Village Hall Monday 16th June 2008. 30 people attended and pre-registrations started to be taken. Several presentations followed where details of the scheme were explored with potential investors and customers. Update 14/2/09: Target of 40 registrations exceeded & investment secured - project now proceeding with planning permission. Thanks to all villagers who are supporting the venture and to Peter Lawson and his team for coordinating things. Update 14/3/09: BT has finally agreed to allow us to have full access to their cabinet (pictured below). BT Openreach cabinet which we will tap into  Update: 28/4/09: Planning permission for the cabinet has been secured from Rutland County Council. Lyddington is a designated conservation area. Update 27/5/09: Rutland Telecom's Lyddington project is featured in the national media being the UK's first commercial deployment of subloop with full metallic path facilities. Update 24/7/09: Civil Engineering work commences 10am (pics, YouTube). Work completed in under 6 hours (YouTube). Update 14/8/09: Street cabinet installation. Mains electricity connection. (pics, more YouTube) Update 1/9/09: Fibre connected, planning for official trial commences Update 15/9/09: The BBC have indicated they will be filming the official opening to take place in the Spring. Update 4/10/09: First phase of trials in Lyddington and Stoke Dry successful. 2nd group of customers being migrated. Transfer of all remaining pre-registered customers now available (those who paid their £30 deposit) Please complete this form to commence your transfer. Update 30/11/09: Almost 30 users are now connected and they are experiencing the benefits of Next Generation Broadband e.g. streaming HD iPlayer. In addition to the high VDSL speeds, customers benefit from our low contention ratios. One of the first customers to be connected gives his feedback: I wanted to write to let you know just how good the broadband and phone service I am getting is. The phone does everything a phone should plus: caller display, call waiting, excellent voicemail. The broadband has transformed our lives! Video calls to my daughter and her family in the USA are now excellent with no break up of picture. Not so long ago we were thinking of buying a pvr for the TV. Not anymore. The problem with a PVR is that you have to plan to record. We can now stream any programmes we missed straight from the BBC, ITV channel 4 or 5 catch up services straight to the TV, including HD TV or of course we can also save to the computer and play back at anytime in the next 30 days. The picture quality is the same. I have attached a print of the results of a speed test at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/diagnostics Bart Taylor-Harris |
