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Lots of congratulations to Libby Bateman, who was at the House of Lords this afternoon to pick up her £5000 prize for winning  TalkTalk’s North West Digital Hero award 2011.

Libby Bateman with Charles Dunstone, chairman of Talk Talk, Martha Lane-Fox, UK Digital Champion, and others at the House of Lords.

She beat two other nominees to win the prize. She sadly missed out on the national prize of £10,000 but will come back to Cumbria with £5000 for the East Cumbria Community Broadband Forum.

In case you missed them, here are the articles about Libby in the Westmorland Gazette and the News & Star.

Well done Libby!

A couple of things. First, the House of Commons culture, media and sport committee has published it’s long-awaited report on spectrum policy. You can read it here. The committee has thrown its weight firmly behind the idea of increasing the coverage obligation attached to one 4G licence to 98% of the population.

It also urges Ofcom and BDUK to work closely with each other to ensure that lack of backhaul doesn’t become the excuse that Mobile Network Operators give for not providing coverage in rural areas. This means that deployments like Connecting Cumbria should also be undertaken with an eye on what the MNOs might need.Easier said than done!

Second, yesterday Ofcom launched online coverage maps comparing levels of outdoor mobile phone coverage and superfast broadband availability by local authority. You can check them out here.

According to the maps, 97% of premises and 66% of the UK landmass can receive a 2G signal outdoors from all four 2G networks.

This means that approximately 900,000 UK premises do not have a choice of all four 2G mobile networks.

For 3G, 73% of premises and 13% of the UK’s landmass can receive a signal outdoors from all five 3G networks, with lower coverage in less densely populated areas.

This means that approximately 7.7million UK premises do not have a choice of all five 3G mobile networks.

Now that £150m is available to build base stations in rural areas check out Ofcom’s sitefinder tool to see what’s near you (and where no doubt base stations are missing!)

Can be read here, in case you’ve missed it.

with an interview with Fra Cooke, chair of Cumbria’s Hub coordinators!

Vote for Libby Bateman!

Click here: http://www.talktalk.co.uk/digitalheroes/region.php?region=north_west

And help the East Cumbria Community Broadband Forum.

Could she be the North West’s Digital Hero 2011?

If Libby wins, she will get a £5000 technology grant to help the work of the East Cumbria Community Broadband Forum.

She will also get the chance to get the chance to be overall winner and win a grand prize of £10,000.

Every vote counts!

L-R: Joan Raine (Eden District Council), Martin Butcher (Kryton TV), Guy Jarvis, Simon Davison, Craig Brass (all NextGenUs)

Congratulations to Guy Jarvis (@fibreguy), Craig Brass (@craigbrass) and their team at NextGenUs for successfully installing a wireless node at High Murber Farm, Sleagill. The core node will provide backhaul for wireless nodes at Murton, Blencarn, Dufton, Milburn, Great Salkeld and Cliburn, and NextGenUs hope to increase speeds from 0.3Mbps to a top speed of 75Mbps, with peak time speeds of 25Mbps.

NextGenUs will be making announcements as progress continues on the network, so keep an eye on their blog.

The TalkTalk Digital Heroes awards are currently looking for the Digital Heroes of 2011!

Nominate yourself

Winners get £5000 and free broadband for 12 months.

Awards will be given to “twelve outstanding individuals who are using the power of the internet to implement bright ideas which bring about positive social change.”

The criteria are as follows:

- The project is using digital technology to solve a social problem or improve people’s lives

- The project mustn’t be a commercial enterprise

They need nominations from you - you can even nominate yourself …

SO GET NOMINATING!

Let’s make sure at least one Digital Hero is Cumbrian

The Big Society and rural broadband

You may have spotted Louis and me round and about Cumbria with a video camera recently. We may even have interviewed you! It’s because over the last few weeks we’ve been putting together a couple of videos about the Big Society project in Cumbria. We now proudly present ‘The Big Society and Rural Broadband’, one of two films we produced for the ‘Big Society: One Year On’ event in Westminster last week. It features David Tunstall of Tunstall Tractors in Fell End, as well as a few familiar faces from this website and the broadband project generally. We hope you enjoy it!

There is also a film about Neighbourhood Planning, which you can watch by clicking on this link.

The map was published this morning.

Check it out here:

The map shows:

· The availability of superfast broadband
· The average broadband take-up
· the average maximum speed for current generation broadband and cable services
· The percentage of homes getting less than 2Mbps

The map is divided in to 200 authorities. Each area has been ranked according to a score given for each of the measures above and colour coded with green ranking highest, and red lowest.

Unfortunately, it shows how much there is to be done in Cumbria.

Cumbria scores very badly on the all important measures of the percentage of homes getting less than 2Mbps (Cumbria scores 21.1%  - among the very highest in England) and the availability of superfast broadband (a big 0% in Cumbria). Only take-up is respectable (if not a glowing result).

Let’s make sure that we reverse this situation by 2015!

Recently American publications have been reporting an unusual wireless project that didn’t make many headlines over here, but looks like a dream community network. The scheme, which is called FabFi, is described on its website as ‘an open-source, FabLab-grown system using common building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles.’ To put it another way, FabFi is a community wireless network set up in Eastern Afghanistan, made out of rubbish and car batteries. It uses technology developed at MIT and most of its Afghan staff were recruited as university students.

Each node in the network at Jalalabad costs about $60 to install - the network components are all ordinary bits of circuitry, and the masts are built out of whatever material is to hand. It’s a relatively simple process to put them together:

Commercial wireless routers are mounted on homemade RF reflectors covered with a metallic mesh surface. Another router-on-a-reflector is set up at a distance; the two routers then create an ad-hoc network that provides Internet access to a whole network of reflectors. The number of reflectors which can be integrated into the network is theoretically endless; FabFi’s network covers most of Jalalabad.

The reflectors can be built out of wood, metal, plastics, stone, clay, or any other locally available product that the metallic mesh can be attached to. FabFi also designed their devices to run on power generated by an automobile battery, which means the networks an also go “off-the-grid” if necessary. [Fast Company]

It seems the spirit of JFDI is alive and well! Have a look at the FabLab blog for more info.