Before his village got a fast internet connection, Ben Longman’s life was a lot more complicated – and his business was a lot harder. Ordering stock for the pub where he is landlord, a process that should take a few minutes, was instead the work of more than half an hour. It was a struggle to reply to emails on time, or even to get a playlist to run properly.
But then the residents of Michaelston-y-Fedw, the small village 10 miles from Cardiff where Longman lives, decided they wouldn’t put up with it any longer. Instead of waiting for a national provider to give them ultrafast broadband, they did it themselves.
“We, as a business, struggled to do online banking, payroll and even ordering,” Longman. “In the middle of an order, you’d be going through 36 pages of stock and then would lose the connection and have to start again. Something that now takes three to four minutes would take 40 minutes or longer.”
After Labour set out plans to give free full-fibre broadband to every home and business in the UK, Michaelston-y-Fedw has come back into focus as an example of the costs that not having fast internet entails – and the benefits that it brings with it when it comes.
Longman said the benefits of the village’s enterprise had been significant.
“I’d also get about 30-40 emails all dated a few days ago,” he said. “We are a web-based business. People in the pub would hear the same song, we had 2,000 or 3,000 tracks on a playlist but each time the internet would drop out it would go back to the first song.”
The brains behind the plan to move away from the low internet speed of 4Mbps was Dave Schofield, who enlisted a team of about 30 local volunteers to sort out the problem.
Village residents were enthusiastic enough to back the project financially, raising £150,000 by buying shares in a not-for-profit Community Interest Company.
Schofield said: “We took matters into our own hands as we understood we were in an area where there was no realistic prospect of getting fast, reliable broadband anytime soon.”
Nonetheless, the Community Interest Company did not respond positively to Labour’s proposals. “While the concept of providing fibre broadband to every household and business in the UK is something we wholeheartedly support we cannot agree that this would be the right way to go about it,” it said. It warned that the plan could spell the end for their network as well as larger providers, and the government “should concentrate their efforts on supporting the existing companies to do this.”
Schofield said that his service was now working exactly as it should. “It is highly reliable and at 1Gbps (1,000Mbps) it is really fast ... typical results are constantly 940Mbps upload and download. On demand TV, videos and file downloads now happen instantly instead of having to wait for things to happen.”
He added that the wider community had benefited significantly, and they now have “radiologists who can work from home looking at large medical images where before they had to travel into hospitals to work as the internet was so slow”.
“Local farmers have diversified into rural enterprises such as bed and breakfasts and rural workshops,” he added.
“Local people own and operate our network and everyone has a feeling that they are more part of a community than they ever have before,” Schofield said.
Welsh government grants and the UK Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme were fundamental to funding the network, he explained.
“Funding is still available and any community could do this if they really wanted to,” Schofield added.
The project was also aided by farmers and landowners who gave permission for trenches to be dug to lay the thin fibre optic cables needed to get the broadband off the ground.
“Everyone appreciates the thousands of hours of hard work that have been put in by volunteers to make this project a reality. We now have a world-class broadband service that is second to none,” Schofield said.
