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Little London |
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Mapping and location information for Little London and Smannell. Little London and Smannell are two settlements located just to the north east of Andover, roughly 12km in a straight line from the BT telephone exchange. The settlements comprise of 40-50 dwellings a school and a pub. The school has recently undergone a refurbishment and is also having an improved link to SWAN. The distance from the BT exchange is too far for conventional broadband delivered over copper wires. BT have quoted £168,000 to dig a new trench and deliver a thicker copper wire which could deliver a maximum speed of up to 1Mb/s.
Residents of Smannell and Little London would like to take advantage of the new link being installed for the school and are puzzled that BT cannot make better use of this infrastructure.
The link being provided is a private circuit that can only be used by the school. The link also ends at the school, this is a location that is around 1km from the main housing of Little London and there isn’t currently a method for allowing public access to the bandwidth available at the school, although there are possibilities that this may become possible once the new contract for HPSN2 is awarded.
However, residents will still have the problem of finding an ISP (or creating their own) to deliver broadband services to peoples homes. It may be possible to explore this in conjunction with Community Broadband Network or organisations such as Cybermoor in Alston, Cumbria. The maps below show the location of the sites, starting in the south with Smannell (the Y junction is where the school is) and then panning north to the village of Little London; showing the houses to be relatively dense.
Further Notes: There has been some discussion about using the HPSN SWAN broadband connection to the primary school in Smannell to deliver broadband services to the community. The option to use the network supplied by Synetrix for community broadband was explored three years ago and contractual, commercial and technical solutions which met the various regulatory and EU were developed.
This was not pursued any further as it was overtaken by BT's roll out of broadband to all the exchanges in Hampshire and it was not commercially viable for any company to provide a service to the small number of people not served by BT or Virgin Media. While the approach may be viable for Smannell, the practical problem is that Synetrix is due to be replaced by a new contractor as a result of the current HPSN2 tender with the new contract due to be awarded in April 2009. At the moment we do not know what the bidders for the HPSN2 contract will be able to deliver, but the expectation is that we will get an improved service for the price we are currently paying. The requirements and the evaluation criteria are designed to achieve the best value for money for the delivery of services by the public sector. The bidders have been told that we may want to use the HPSN2 for community broadband and they will have to address this in their Best and Final Offers. We will not be in a position until March 2009 to have a view on whether the HPSN2 is likely to be worth considering ahead of other alternatives. It is almost certain that it will be technically feasible to use the HPSN2 as part of the solution, but it will only deliver service to the school and there will be costs to extend the service to the community. The approach developed three years ago used a commercial organisation to provide the service to the community based on the connection to the school. It was not seen as the role of the Council to provide this service, though this could be reviewed. In either case the County Council would incur risks and obligations, particularly if the commercial organisation failed which is not uncommon in these types of arrangement. |