So many choices - so little broadband!

Today, yet another rural broadband solution has popped up with little warning. This one is on page 13 of the EDP and has Norfolk Rural Community Council ( see http://www.norfolkrcc.org.uk/wiki/index.php/About) as part of the project.

It is a wireless network solution from a company called ThinkingWISP (see http://www.thinkingwisp.co.uk/) and is also backed by Anglian Farmers ( see http://www.angliafarmers.co.uk/content/home.asp).

It is similar to the solution we have been developing for Lyng, using a wireless transmission from Norwich Airport to a mast at Marsham, north west of the city. It is planned to serve an area around from Erpingham in the north to Drayton,south and from Reepham west to Colitishall east.
Service will be between 3.5Mbs and 13 with data limits between 10 and unlimited. Prices are from £15.99 a month to a business plus service at £50.99. Subscribers will need a suitable antenna and installation as per our set up (no costs is indicated) and the service is encrypted and asynchronous. So it has more potential than ours.

Its sudden appearance without previously showing on the radar is similar to the diocesan project called WIspire. This denies any criticism of a backward looking church by taking a fat fibre pipe to a church at Spixworth (north of Norwich) and then developing a fully meshed wireless network using church spires. It gives ley lines a whole new meaning!

What gets me is that these projects seem to have deliberately kept under wraps. Yet the young CEO of the NRCC says they have 500 expressions of interest already. They got £37,000 funding from Defra and the EU.
I strongly believe that this piecemeal process, of which we seem to be an unwilling part, is not in the best interests of the community at large. Any one of these projects could go under leaving hundreds back at square one - or, worse not connected at all even to BT.