Fujikura 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 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...
Read MoreB4RN Phase 1 Coverage Clarification
There have been some question regarding the B4RN coverage asked recently especially since the announcement of the Lancashire County Council Superfast Broadband project so we thought it best to reiterate the details of the coverage of the project. The full hyperfast B4RN service will be available to 100% of the properties of phase 1 That’s it. Simple. Every property – not the ‘majority’ or just those in some of the villages, but every single property will have access to one of the fastest and best connections in the world right through the parish. The current build...
Read MoreDigital Parish Hubs
Well what a week that was! Lots more deliveries, including all the fibre for the whole core route. Sponsored metre has seen lots of people contributing a fiver to get their name on the fat ducts, and there is still time to get your name, or the children’s or your business name on some of the fat stuff. Photos of the names are now online, and those people are now members of our people’s network. Thank you all. The hubs landed on Thursday, and by Friday the main one at Quernmore was installed on its plinth. We debated about the colour but green won… It looks like a cabinet,...
Read MoreJoining on a house
Last week Bruce took photos of an installation to a house. This house has dug to the field boundary, and under the fence, and into the main duct. As you can see from the short video from his photos it is hard work but no harder than planting potatoes! If you get the fibre planted you will harvest a fantastic crop… its a gigabit fibre bringing the world to your door.
Read MoreOur first B4RN highlight video
A lot of people in our community network can’t stream video, so we have made a CD for them and have put the highlights on a little Youtube video for everyone else to see. The footage was taken whilst out and about at the various dig locations, it’s amateur footage but it gives a taste of what we are doing this month. The money from the shareholders has financed the purchase of enough stock to complete the whole core route of phase 1. We are still accepting investments from the public to finance the remainder of this phase. Details on how to do this can be found here. Here are some...
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