Broadband Cumbria

This article appears in the April edition of Sedbergh Lookaround magazine. It is reproduced here with references that are not in the printed version (which would have been too text-heavy). References are at the foot of the post.

Broadly Glamping

For a number of reasons I find myself a champion of broadband development in Sedbergh. People sometimes ask me why Sedbergh needs faster broadband, when they are perfectly happy with the internet speeds they have already. And that’s a fair question, so I’ll try to give some answers to it here.

Answer 1. Not everyone whose telephone comes through the Sedbergh exchange gets broadband, the further away from the exchange you are, in general the slower the speed, and there are many on the Sedbergh exchange who get no broadband at all. Changing this will almost inevitably mean faster broadband for those nearer the exchange.

Answer 2. In The Economist’s World in 2011 supplement, Julia Gillard, prime minister of Australia, gave a good description of why a high-speed digital future is so necessary for the development of a modern nation¹. (Sadly, the article by David Cameron in the same publication is rather bizarre and shows no such vision². Possibly he sees the point, I hope so.)

Answer 3. Farming. Demand for meat in the UK is considerably less than it once was, yet is rising rapidly worldwide as people in poorer countries get richer³. And raising animals requires high volumes of something that is in short supply in many areas yet we have plenty of: water⁴. So our area should be well set-up to prosper from the changing conditions. Getting the product to the people who are asking for it will be a challenge I guess and if it is going to happen at all will require among other things a fast digital infrastructure, somewhat along the lines of what is being put in place with arable farming in Brazil⁵.

Answer 4. Tourism. ‘Glamping’ is on the rise. It’s short for ‘glamourous camping’. To quote: ‘GPS-enabled smart phones will feature applications that identify birds and purport to repel insects via high-frequency tones’⁶. Free-to-use and high-speed wi-fi connections will be the expectation, then. Now I know there are some who yearn for the cold tap and midge-infused porridge; that is increasingly a specialised market and does not form the thrust of Sedbergh’s current tourism strategy (I believe).

Answer 5. The management consultants in the hills. Remote working is a good thing because people who work that way tend to have minimal environmental impact and can sometimes bring in quite a lot of money. Such folk will increasingly be expected by their contacts to be able to participate in video-conferencing, requiring fast digital connection.

Answer 6. The small companies. Our own company at one time got away with selling itself as a high-tech creative industry, but would struggle more now as expectations have risen faster than has broadband provision in Sedbergh. (Mercifully, for a number of reasons, we no longer even contemplate government contracts, so we are not as worried as we might be).

So there we are, five and a half very good reasons to agitate for faster broadband in Sedbergh and district, even if you are entirely happy with what you’ve got. I hope that that, together with the references, help explain why – it’s for the community.

Notes

1. To read Julia Gillard’s view, see her article in The World in 2011, from The Economist. As Phil Thompson points out in a comment to a previous post on this site, Julia Gillard is in fact continuing the initiative of her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, see Broadband gets go ahead in the Sydney Morning Herald.

2. The article by David Cameron, A global agenda, seems somewhat strange from a country’s leader in showing little or nothing by way of leadership. he seems to be relying on everyone else to do something. Pity.

3. From The Economist A special report on feeding the world,
How much is enough?:
‘In 2000, 56% of all the calories consumed in developing countries were provided by cereals and 20% by meat, dairy and vegetable oils. By 2050, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) thinks, the contribution of cereals will have dropped to 46% and that of meat, dairy and fats will have risen to 29%. To match that soaring demand, meat production will need to increase to 470m tonnes by 2050, almost double its current level.’

4. From The Economist A special report on feeding the world,
No Easy Fix:
‘Arjen Hoekstra, of the University of Twente, says it takes 1,150–2,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of wheat, but about 16,000 litres of water for 1kg of beef.’

5. See The Economist A special report on feeding the world,
No Easy Fix, the initial paragraphs of that article.

6. Quoted from The Economist World in 2011 The world in figures: Industries: Travel & tourism which itself quotes a report by Mintel that I think was commissioned by Halfords. A number of papers carried stories based on this report, for example see The Daily Mail, 27 May 2010, We’re all going ‘glamping’.

Sadly, the ‘forward-looking’ title in this case does not refer to Mr Cameron. Oh, if he were to take the line that Julia Gillard is in Australia. Then we would have a forward-looking and dynamic approach to high-speed broadband from government. What Ms Gillard has to say makes the British Broadband Strategy sound like the work of a collection of dusty tooth-suckers.

To read Julia Gillard’s view, see her article in The World in 2011, from The Economist .

Her plan is for Fibre to the Home covering 93% of homes and businesses in Australia. I quote:

‘High-speed broadband is the essential infrastructure for increasing productivity. Right now, Australia is reaping great benefits from the global resources boom. In 2011 our terms of trade will reach their highest level in history. But we know our mineral resources cannot secure enduring prosperity. We want to lock in our prosperity by investing the proceeds of the boom in our future competitive advantage—the skills of our people and advanced infrastructure.’

How about that for forward thinking!

Admittedly Australia does not have the level of national financial deficit that Britain does at the moment, but then again if you are thinking about rural . . .

Incidentally David Cameron had a piece in that same publication, titled A Global Agenda. In that article, and I cannot comment generally but in that article at least, he seems to be wanting everyone else to implement the vision, not himself. Could this be symptomatic of the high-speed broadband approach of the government too, maybe?

A Dream Come True, Sort Of

For some time I have been hoping that software would appear that would allow our company to do seamless backups of its data to an online repository. By seamless, I mean that it runs in the background and requires us to remember nothing. By an online repository, I mean somewhere remote from here, so that no one has to remember to cart backup discs about.

And now, it has. Hooray!. In fact at least two products, though one of the two only runs on Intel-chip Macs, which limits its use somewhat. The other, though, runs on pcs, Macs and Unix. Excellent!

And better still, you can backup to another network location, or an ftp server, or to Amazon S3. We have just begun backing up to Amazon S3 and it’s really working well.

You do need a moderately good broadband connection for this, of course, which for upload none of us has. It took days, literally, for the initial upload. Mirroring as we now do depends on the volume of files we have been modifying since the previous backup. Our accounts file can take a fair while, as can Adobe Creative Suite files from Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. Though in the background this feels a whole lot easier than having to wait while the backup takes place.

Here in the centre of Sedbergh we get about 370kbps upload speed. Any less than that would probably be unworkable. I suppose we can say we’re privileged in a way, though this is going to be one of those things that those who can do, are serious, and those who can’t do, severely disadvantaged. 370kbps is only really just about enough because we’re a small company.

OK then, how’s it done?

The Intel Mac-only software is called Twin, and the multi-platform software, that we are using, is Super Flexible File Synchronizer. As we run both pcs and Macs Twin is of limited interest to us so I can only speak for SuperFlexible, and at the moment the only thing I can find to say against it is its name.

SuperFlexible seems to have been written by a German musician living near Osnabrück. Considering that it appears to be the work on just one man, it is quite extraordinarily easy to set up, full-featured and reliable. You also get it on 30 days free trial, which is handy. Find the costs from the website, it is very reasonably priced.

Superflexible has Amazon S3 capability built in. Amazon S3 is also impressive, giving you a replica of individual directories or folders on your computer, or in our case and even more essentially useful, on our network. aws.amazon.com gives you all you need to know. Simply sign up with a credit card, and then you get charged solely for what you use.

The Future! For those who have broadband, ie everyone, eventually, it’ll have to be!

Gina Barney Associates in Sedbergh are independent vertical transportation consultants. Expert in lifts and escalators.

According to Dr. Gina Barney, the drop in broadband speed that occurred for ten days in September 2010 in about half of the lines connected to the Sedbergh exchange – when download speeds dropped to single- or double-digit megabits per second – brought home the reality of just how crucial an acceptably functioning broadband connection is to business. As Dr Barney says, during that time her business was practically forced to cease operating.

Dr Barney regularly exchanges files with legal firms and clients all over the world, and with organisations such as the British Standards Institution (BSI), the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), firms and organisations that expect rapid, professional and instant responses.

As Dr Barney says, a world-class and reliable broadband connection is an expectation for someone in her renowned professional position. Just how renowned, you can judge for yourself by looking at her website, www.liftconsulting.org and noticing the email address: none. This is not because Dr Barney doesn’t have email, on the contrary, her company’s broadband connection is needed predominantly for email; rather it is that, when you are really well known in your field, people find you because they need to and want to.

Qualys, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider, have published a paper called The Big Shift to Cloud-based Security, subtitled How small and medium-sized organizations can manage their IT risks and maintain regulatory compliance with
minimal staff and budget. It is clearly publicity to sell their services, that’s fair enough, but includes some generic wisdom for all that.

As the paper points out, data security is going beyond the need to try and ensure your files are forever intact, it is becoming a business compliance issue. Increasingly, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) handle sensitive data from their clients (this is not new, some years ago as a consultant programmer I had access to MOD controlled information, some of which was of necessity on my own office system for a short time - I was very careful with it, but had I been backing-up to a remote location, which on other counts I should have been, then it potentially could have gone out of my control).

The answer is the Cloud. There’s security in the Cloud, as the article makes clear. And not only is there that, but your clients, who may be demanding assurances about what you do with any data of theirs that you hold, including your hanging on to it as you manipulate and re-present it, can be so assured. So you get the work.

BUT, it does require fast broadband, without that it is a non-starter.

Now given that one future of the rural economy is clearly going to be the servicing of large corporations in one way or another by expert consultants and technicians – for all manner of reasons that must be an important mode of development – given that, the idea that rural areas are behind on broadband provision doesn’t make sense, we need as a society to be competing internationally and to international corporate compliance standards.

The Qualys article is to be found here, or it is in some browsers but I cannot get that to work in Firefox. Amazing how large companies can send out publicity for their software, and make such an elementary software error as that. So to save you the trouble of struggling to get hold of it (and to save you the trouble of registering with Qualys – serves them right) I have put it as a pdf for you to download at http://www.sedbergh.org.uk/links/frs.pdf.

Dave Collier

Beamsmoor Care provides carers to people in their own homes from its branches in Kendal and Ulverston; its administrative head office is in Sedbergh.

Owner Nigel Close says, ‘We have been looking with our IT support consultants, KTD in Kendal and Furness Internet in Ulverston, at how to implement a true wide area network for our business, so that the terminals in our head office and branches operate as if they were on a local network. We have even considered a leased line from BT but this is prohibitively expensive’.

Beamsmoor Care currently communicates electronically between its administrative offices and branches using Windows Remote Desktop over existing broadband links together with email or ftp for the transfer of files. As Nigel says, ‘The method we are using is unsatisfactory both at a practical level and because it is intrinsically insecure. It is a factor that acts as a brake on growth. We urgently need a realistic wide area network to put us on a level footing with our competitors in better-equipped parts of the country.’

A broadband link at speeds upwards of 10Mbps would go a long way towards allowing Beamsmoor Care to operate in a 21st century business environment.

www.beamsmoor.co.uk

Me-and-Us publishes books and resources for teachers on personal, social and health education and is one of very few companies to publish materials in this field for teachers of young people with learning disabilities.

Technical director David Collier explains, ‘We do nearly all our business online. Because our materials are produced in short runs, including some print-on-demand (POD), we use printers in various parts of Europe, sending artwork and receiving proofs electronically. The vast majority of our orders arrive electronically from various sources, not least because many of our customers are health and local authorities whose systems increasingly work that way. We use a fulfillment company for despatching orders and communicate with them day-to-day entirely online. We send our materials to many countries: Iceland, Botswana, Thailand, as well as the more expected places like Canada and Australia’.

David adds, ‘Between 2003 and 2005 our company was responsible for producing the educational and training materials for the multi-million pound research programme for drugs education in schools, called Blueprint, for the Home Office. We tendered for and got this project partly on the basis of our broad-ranging technical expertise in a range of media including electronic communication. Books and CDs were produced to tight deadlines, using designers based in London, Oxford, Banbury, Birmingham and Luxembourg. At the time a 5Mpbs broadband connection was enough, since no one else had much faster. I am not sure we could get away with that now’.

The key for Me-and-Us is reliability, since without an internet connection the business effectively stops.

www.me-and-us.co.uk

A worry for many small-to-medium-sized businesses is their data, especially financial and management data, that are now predominantly held on computer. The worry is not so much the data, as what happens if it gets lost or destroyed.

Many companies back up their data to removable backup devices, and if they are especially diligent they store these well away from the original hard disc so that if one goes up in smoke the other should still be usable.

This is not a very satisfactory method though; there is the problem of remembering to do it and the control of rotation of discs. It is also very 20th century in concept.

The current-day way to backup data is to an online repository, and Sedbergh is unusual in having one of these in the form of a dedicated community web server that is located in Germany and which itself is backed up every night. Some companies in Sedbergh subscribe to and use this facility.

But that is still a somewhat antiquated approach, the truly current way to back up data is into the Cloud, using a service such as Amazon S3. Some people in Sedbergh are experimenting with ways of implementing this such that it can be transported to the systems of those with a lower level of technical expertise, in other words be installed and operated seamlessly.

Cloud-backup should be vastly superior to other methods as it does not rely upon ability to apply techniques such as ftp, it does not require local subscriptions, and if implemented right should run in the background without operator intervention.

These ‘should’s are perfectly practical, given the right setup, though broadband upload speeds are an issue. 0.3Mbps (the norm for standard copper-wire broadband) is just about manageable, just about.

High-speed broadband permits a secure business environment.