News & Events

News archive: Guest Blog – New Customer Experience

April 14th, 2013
Author: Chris Conder
Tags: blog ftth guest
Posted In: Archive News

The B4RN community has been busy lately connecting new customers along the ever growing core route. Some great good news stories have been coming out from many of the newly connected customers about how the B4RN connection has affected them. Some have shared their views on the Facebook page and others have sent a few words to our guest blog page wanting to share their experiences with the rest of the community.

Many words have been said about the benefits of a fast a reliable connection by the B4RN team and the media but the ones that come from customers who are experiencing first hand what the connection means to them are much more insightful.

Here’s the latest one from Andy Pearson resident of Arkholme, one of the best connected villages in the world. Thanks to Andy for taking the time to share his experience with other members of the community. Over to Andy.

The process, when it happened, was very quick and easy. Provide the power to the ‘box on the wall’ and watch as the green lights on the top illuminate. Bingo! One of the fastest domestic Internet connections available anywhere and on a different planet to anything the incumbent supplier can offer.

I remembered what Bill Clinton said when he got the presidency “I feel like the dog that chases the garbage truck and finally catches it. Now what do I do?”

I feel a bit like that dog too.

First thing to do was to connect all the gadgets we’ve got. One old MacBook laptop, one old windows PC, two iPads, two smartphones, an iPod touch and an Internet radio. All at once.

It worked. No more spinning beach balls, no more waiting for the hourglass to go away. They can all simultaneously place demands on the new system and it copes. Full of enthusiasm I did a speed test. I expected to get a really high number and was quite disappointed when I didn’t. I got ‘only’ 19MBs on my laptop using an Ethernet connection. Now, to keep that in context, I ran a check on the still functioning incumbent Internet supplier (you can guess who) and got the usual 0.46MBs result. So straight away B4RN is about 40 times better. Worried that my new service wasn’t as quick as it was cracked up to be I borrowed a teenager (hello Jasmine) who owns a new MacBook Air. Straight away she got a speed test result on the WiFi of over 90MBs. So the good news (I think) was that my gear was old and simply couldn’t take advantage of the new lightning fast speeds available. Best I start saving up for something more modern. Worth reiterating though that I’m still 40 times faster now, even with my ancient gear, and there’s no buffering to spoil videos any more.

Next thing to do was sort out the telephone line. Being charged sixteen odd quid ‘line rental’ every month for a rotten old copper wire has always struck me as spectacularly poor value for money. Now that the line was no longer needed for the Internet I thought why bother with it at all? Bit of a no brainer really. So we have moved over to Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VOIP as it’s known and now use the Internet for phone calls. A Google search reveals loads of providers and the likelihood is that they all come out at about the same price for a domestic user. It’s likely too that either you’ll need new phones (Digital European Cordless Telecommunications, DECT phones) or, like us, a box that allows you to use your existing phones. Whichever company you choose will supply all that you need and once again it’s a very simple business to set it up and get going. They gave us a new phone number (05603 xxx xxx) and apart from that it’s just like it always was. Only cheaper, and not as crackly.

That’s it for now. A bit of new equipment, a bit of electronic ‘paperwork’, a new phone number and a much much faster Internet all costing less on a monthly basis. Happy days. For the future we’ll need to upgrade our computers and investigate how to get Internet onto our TV so that we can make use of BBC iPlayer (other channels are available) and film services such as Netflix or LoveFilm.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the Internet is changing the way we do things and our patterns of life. Whatever the future brings in this regard, thanks to B4RN we in this area of rural north Lancashire will be able to keep up with the changes and be part of this digital revolution.