Newton’s Law. The Next Village to Get Fibre
Newton’s first law of motion states, “An object at rest remains at rest unless acted upon by a force. An object in motion remains in motion, and at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force.” The village of Newton, near Lancaster was mainly at rest until a great force was applied to it. Community Power. The community have pulled together to bring the B4RN fibre into the village. Soon they will be the next village to receive gigabit fibre broadband and be enjoying the benefits as Arkholme, Qurenmore and Abbeystead already are. So this village will remain in motion...
Read MoreMaria Miller Thanks B4RN Team After Visit
As regular visitors to this site will have seen, B4RN was visited by the Secretary of State for the DCMS, Maria Miller on 29th April. Feedback from the visit deemed it to be very useful with all participants saying it was very worthwhile. Following the visit, B4RN received the following note from Mrs Miller “It was great to be invited by the tireless local MP, Eric Ollerenshaw, to learn more about B4RN and I would like to thank the entire team for hosting such a welcoming and informative visit. It was a great opportunity to see a project on the ground that is being delivered by...
Read MoreB4RN and Emtelle Show – Tell day.
Update 15th May. Last chance to register for this event is Thursday 16th May. Although this event will not be live streamed, it will be recorded and posted on-line so if you cannot make it in person then please submit your questions via the event contact email address and they will be addressed by the team. The email address to register attendance and submit questions is info@emtelle.com B4RN Emtelle Show Tell Day 230513 Please click on the link for more info. B4RN and Emtelle are hosting a “Show – Tell” day on Thursday 23rd May 2013, sharing experiences and...
Read MoreFujikura 12S
This last few weeks B4RN volunteers have been test driving the new Fujikura 12S in the fields, and the homes in Rural England. With sheep. And Tea. Fujikura are very kindly loaning this splicer to B4RN for a few weeks because we only have one splicer and the diggers and farmers are digging like mad and its a job to keep up with them! The volunteers are busy blowing the fibre and installing equipment in homes and businesses. It’s all go at the moment and with lambing time looming everyone has a push on. On one row in Arkholme of the 40 properties all but 5 took a connection, with 32...
Read More“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley”
The first connections at Arkholme were due to go live before Christmas, but nature had other ideas. As the title of this post suggests, things did not go to plan but many lessons have been learnt and solutions found. We hope others can benefit from these experiences and this is the start of our ‘Lessons Learnt’ section. We will post here each time we come up against a problem to share our findings. This was a particularly hard lesson for us. We had all worked so hard to get live for Christmas, and to fall at the last hurdle was gutting. We soon realised that this was in fact a...
Read MoreDecember newsletter and Thank You
Thank You from B4RN Thanks to you all for your support this past year, and what a year it has been. A year ago we had only just launched our shares! The B4RN management committee would like to thank many individually but there are far too many, so we’ll categorise it a bit. Thanks to all the farmers and landowners who have let the diggers on their land despite the appalling conditions and had faith in us to make as little mess as possible and make it good afterwards. Thanks to the farmers who have done their own digging too, and those who have helped us get under walls and tracks,...
Read MoreBlowing in the wind and fleeting in the sleet… with Pete.
Yesterday our new blowing machine arrived. This is due to the sponsorship of three B4RN members, who have bought it in memory of Anton. Anton was very proud of the project and wanted to buy something to help it succeed. Well it worked a treat Anton, and we’ll soon get caught up with the farmers digging all the ducting in now we have our own blower. Here is a short 2 minute video of it being tried out yesterday, in appalling conditions. We kidnapped the demo man (Pete) who showed us all the tricks of the trade. He stayed all day, finally escaping once we knew the fibre had made it all...
Read MoreFusion Splicing in Arkholme
“Twas on a Monday morning…” Many people have offered to help us in exchange for shares in B4RN. One of these was Lee, from Core Precision. He came to visit us on Monday and because it was fine weather for a change we ‘kidnapped’ him and he did some fusion for us. A man of grit. He had no wellies, so we put a fibre mat down (notice the brand name on the mat and you’ll see the fibre pun), but it wasn’t very effective as you can see from the video! His wife Shalini posted on Facebook that he trailed our mud all through her lovely house… oops. She...
Read MoreB4RN The Movie. A New Fund Raising Idea?
This is a bit of a light-hearted post as a result of a short video made by one of the team. She’s getting quite good at it. With each new video there’s an extra twist. This video is a compilation of some of the more recent activity entitled “B4RN”. If there’s anyone out there interested in buying the file rights? You know how to get in touch Feel free to suggest who would play the lead...
Read MoreWe Learn How to Fleet Fibre
Last week we learnt how to do long fibre blows. Once again, many thanks to Emtelle for their expert guidance, knowledge transfer and support of this community project. It is very much appreciated. Congratulations to all who have worked so hard this past few weeks to accomplish this. The blow was 3.5 kilometres, and fusion is now ongoing, and Arkholme will shortly go live, so both ends of our main core route will be working. If you are blowing a distance its better to fleet the fibre (some call it spooling) in between the access chambers. You can buy a machine to fleet on to, but we did it...
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