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The now globally infamous #Twicket Match in Wray, Lancashire today highlights just what can be done when rural areas have true broadband. The live streamed cricket match was a first on the Internet…..more details and full archive on twicket.info This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com Over 2700 people tuned in during the match from around the world to watch, and the online ‘tickets’ reached a staggering 1/2 a million(!) on Eventbrite. The main problem with 21st century UK broadband from the telcos is that it is asymmetrical. This means that live streaming with multiple TV and video cameras, as well as the internet [...]

If it wasn’t so sad, it’d be funny. Community network put in a 100Meg symmetrical backhaul, announce its usage for a livestream of a village cricket match….BT spam the village with A3 posters…. This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com Bear in mind, this is a 7 year story so we’ll keep it to the last month alone. @johnpopham, talking to @danslee, realised that there is a need to bring people into community events needing tech. The event in question became Wray’s Easter weekend cricket match , livestreamed over the Wray network. Wray has a symmetrical broadband connection, provided by Lancaster Uni . Most communities, unless they [...]

At times, it is difficult to comprehend why telcos and incumbents do what they do, say what they say. So….here’s a coupla questions…………. This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com 1. BT plan to upgrade “up to 80% of their copper network to deliver connections of up to 20Mbps by the end of the year?” Our question to BT: how many up to’s can you get in one sentence? What do these “up tos” mean, after Ofcom has told telcos to stop using the term? What precisely are you trying to achieve? Both separately and together, with your Up Tos? For consumers? [...]

Apologies for this post being so late after the event.  It’s been a very busy time On 12 and 13 March we put the final piece of the jigsaw into place by installing three items of equipment in the Village Hall that would enable us to properly manage the network.  These items were: 1  A Windows 7 PC configured for Remote Desktop Connection 2  A CentOS Linux machine configured as a web server and outgoing mail server 3  A Linux machine running the pfSense router application and the Ubiquiti AirControl application The key element is the pf Sense router which assigns reserved IP addresses to every [...]

Scotland thinks it’s being left behind, BDUK is under fire, and BT reckons it can spend yet more money on copper roll out for s’posedly superfast broadband This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com Not read that lot yet? I suggest you do. All on Twitter, Google and a multitude of other platforms. And when you have, the reality that will dawn on you is that if this country was hit by an earthquake, the chance of you having a halfway decent connection as you leg it out of your tower block in the City, to any type of connection to the [...]

Sometimes, we all have to put aside our own concerns to help others. The catastrophe in Japan has led to a group of people around the world coming together, via Twitter, to create Quakebook - an anthology of first hand experiences of the Tohoku earthquake. This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com I am extremely proud to have been one of those people (one of the editors, blog creator, and part of the Yammer promo community) and that Amazon, Sony, Apple and others have all come on board to help us get the book out to the widest audience possible. Yoko [...]

As regular readers know, there have been hints and gripes (to put it mildly!) about some of what appears to have been going on. Recently and not so recently - these are not new occurrences. However, only yesterday on Twitter, we hit the target: “At what point do we stop allowing corporates to ruin communities’ present & future well-being’? That is the crux of the matter. It is relevant at a nuclear, micro, regional, national and international level. This press release has just arrived to re-inforce our fears about rural broadband in the UK. This blog post can be read at [...]

Amazon fail to support Japan #QuakeBook As we reach 14 days today since the earthquake and tsunami, and the consequential nuclear dilemma, a global group of authors, photographers, journalists and bloggers have expressed their frustration at Amazon’s non-support of the publication 2:46 QuakeBook This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com This book includes a multitude of first-hand accounts of the earthquake and its consequences, with all profits going directly to the Red Cross. Such accounts have been noticeably missing from the worldwide press as many journalists have been pulled from the story to report on Libya, or pulled from the region as [...]

Apparently, there’s no money in content, nor broadband, nor supplying us pernickety customers. I beg to differ….. This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com Here’s what I would expect from my dumb fat pipe as extra that I would pay, in total, £10 a month for. Currently, I get all these things for free. But I started my own business at 8 years old. You have to be sustainable. So, make money…find the customers who actually value what you do and are willing to pay. What would I pay for? Let’s get this clear though…you as an ISP cannot re-invent the wheel as [...]

Smartgrids and smart meters are gonna be buzzwords this year, (finally - thanks Chattanooga for JFDI) as the competition hots up to reach consumers and achieve EU Policy requirements for energy - which as I recall were supposed to be satisfied by 2008. But, we are miles out with our thinking. Or some are. This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com Chattanooga has shown the way by combining smart grids plus gigabit FTTH. We ignore such examples at our peril, I believe. Imagine that you had a chance to install “a device” in every single premises in the country. And, just like the [...]

Just in case you have forgotten that there is a major disaster in Japan….Lindsey has done this to me…..This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.comI support this initiative, but the fallout at home will be immense I do have my own blog in case you need to follow Twisted Purr