Here is a guest blog kindly submitted by local film producer John Hamlett of Lunar Multimedia Ltd. As you will read here it’s not only John’s business that is affected by poor broadband. John is an extremely talented film producer as can be seen in his short film noir thriller “The POW”.
Over to John…..
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Most people around me in the village of Gressingham near Lancaster seem to get about 2mbps broadband when it’s working properly – not bad for a rural area! However I make a living from filmmaking and video production so needless to say I’m happy to pay a bit extra to get as much as I can out of the old creaking copper cables that hang precariously around the village.
I signed up with a high quality ISP and pay a bit extra to get 5mbps – that’s good enough to watch on iPlayer without buffering and ‘glitch free’ as long as I don’t try and play it in High Definition (HD)! But a lot of the bandwidth I need is for uploading the videos I make. All the films I produce are in full HD so they’re really big files, so before uploading I need to compress them to a smaller format (which can take hours) and then upload over another several hours. And that’s where standard ‘ADSL’ broadband really fails. Although downloading I get over 5mbps, uploading I only get 0.4mbps – and that’s the fastest any ADSL provider can give me.
But speed’s not the only problem. I’m paying about £18 a month to get that stable 5mbps, but still every month I get an additional bill for the extra bandwidth I use. Anything over 12gb/month is charged at around £2/gb extra, so my monthly bill is always twenty something pounds – and that’s with me usually uploading overnight when bandwidth is free. Reliability is a worry too; if a movie is crucial and really needs to be with a client asap then driving to the post office and paying over £10 for 9am next day special delivery of a DVD is still the best guarantee of getting it there.
However – with a B4RN connection I’ll be able to upload as much as I like, whenever I like with no extra costs. The upload is as fast as the download at 1000mbps so I no longer have to promise clients ‘next day’ delivery, instead it’ll be ‘with in 5 minutes’. In fact it’ll be so fast it’ll give the client time to review and request changes that I can implement and upload all on the same day… and all this on anything from short youtube videos to full HD feature films. Blazingly fast.
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4 Comments
” uploading I only get 0.4mbps – and that’s the fastest any ADSL provider can give me ”
you need to look a bit harder in the market, 832k upload is universally available on BT exchanges and if you get 5M down you would get 700k on an upstream speed test.
Video is bandwidth heavy, and ADSL is designed for content consumers, so I can see your problem.
700k that’s 0.7 meg then phil?
Not even good enough to upload a few little snapshots
We will have to get digging and do it ourselves like in the old days when we put the electric in even though the oldies said we should be grateful for candles.
I agree with john
B4RN will regenerate our villages
Villager is right about the electrickery! Comments used then like ‘it’ll never catch on’ are being replicated now about broadband. We just don’t know yet what we’ll miss if we don’t get good broadband.
And now is the time to do it, when there are talented, knowledgeable and motivated people willing to devote energy and commitment to getting OUR broadband the best there is. We owe it to them to support this project, its for our benefit after all!
I agree Hilary. My view is that it’s now or never. The community has to grab this opportunity while it can or be left with what is offered to us by the main telecom companies and the county council, which despite many requests, there are still no proper details available.
This is the one chance where the community can have truly world class connectivity. It’s then up to the community what they want to achieve with it.