CATTERICK VILLAGE GETS BROADBAND
04 July 2003

The first phase of the community broadband network in Catterick Village is now installed and ready to offer a super-fast Internet connection to homes, businesses, and the new LearnDirect centre.

Community champions, local business people, and the DigitalDales.co.uk team have worked together to raise the necessary funding locally and to bring broadband to the village using the latest satellite based services together with innovative wireless technology. Wi-fi, the wireless technology used, eliminates the need to use the telephone system for delivering broadband to each user, and means that a community network, run by the community for the community, can be set up without requiring BT or other telcos involvement. In Catterick Village, Purple Technology Limited, a local business, provides the broadband connection to the Internet using Aramiska's unique satellite system. A key feature of the system is its scalability, allowing upgrades as more people subscribe to use the network.

Community networks are springing up around the country in response to market failure, and such networks create local employment, keep investment within the region, and encourage new enterprises. The initial capital investment required is minimal, meaning that even the smallest rural community can create their own sustainable broadband network. The Catterick Village network is a flagship project, leading the way for other regional projects to bring broadband and its benefits to rural areas in the near future, enabling communities, and encouraging regeneration.

Phil Upton, Managing Director of Purple Technology, said "Broadband allows both business and residential communities in Catterick Village to have the same advantages as larger towns. We now have educational and training opportunities, as well as being able to compete as businesses in a global market place."

Digital Dales is holding a conference on July 17th at Harlow Carr Gardens in Harrogate entitled "Broadband in Yorkshire". This includes updates on the developments in the region, the central Government rural broadband agenda, news from industry and communities, followed by the DIY Broadband workshop. This workshop covers all the required elements for setting up your own community network - funding, business models, technology options, licensing, case studies, best practice, and much more. All are welcome. Register now on digitaldales.co.uk/broadband

The Digital Dales team spokeperson, Lindsey Annison, who is also co-founder of the Access to Broadband Campaign, said, "This is a really great achievement in Catterick Village. In just 3 months, the initial funding has been raised, the village surveyed, and the equipment installed. This should give hope to all rural communities that broadband is available to everyone, now."

The LearnDirect centre in Catterick Village main high street will be opened by the Rt Hon William Hague on Saturday 5th July at 10.30am, Purple Technology and the Digital Dales team will be on hand to answer questions, advise and encourage other communities to follow the lead of the broadband pioneers in Catterick Village.

FOR EDITORS

Purple Technology is a local business based in Catterick Village offering a range of services to the region including Sales & Marketing, Information Technology & Software Development and Management Training Courses.

Digital Dales is a community project started in the Upper Dales, with a national reputation. The team of local people is responsible for organizing national broadband seminars, promoting and educating businesses and citizens about broadband, and installing wireless broadband networks with its partner organisation Digital Fells, e.g. the DTI/NWDA-funded EdenFaster (www.edenfaster.com) project in Upper Eden valley. Investigations are now under way into providing broadband access along the Wensleydale Railway.

Lindsey Annison, Program Manager for Digital Dales, is also co-founder of the Access to Broadband Campaign (www.ABCampaign.org.uk), and will be speaking at the ABC Rural and Regional Broadband conference in London on July 17th.

Aramiska is a European Internet Service Provider for businesses. It offers Internet services via satellite, based on the advanced two-way open standard DVB-RCS (Digital Video Broadcasting-Return Channel System). Aramiska controls the end-to-end connection and is available everywhere. Aramiska's head office is located in Eindhoven, the Netherlands with local offices in UK, France and Spain.

Funding for the Catterick Village project has come from the LSC, European Objective 2 Priority 3 and the Vital Villages programme.

Contact Details:
Purple Technology - www.purple-technology.biz
(info@purple-technology.biz)
Phil Upton - 01748 812547

Digital Dales - www.digitaldales.co.uk
(team@digitaldales.co.uk)
Lindsey Annison - 07967 670759
Joel Smith - 01423 712591 / 07768 803758

Catterick Village - Community Works Office
(rose@communityworks.fsnet.co.uk)
Melva Steckles - 01748 810050

Aramiska Broadband - www.aramiska.com
(p.gumm@aramiska.net)
Peter Gumm - Marketing Communication Manager
020 8313 7717
[from: JB Wifi]

DorneyWeb Wireless Broadband
13 July 2003

Today marks the start of 145 rural residents receiving high speed, always on, broadband internet access. Dorney Reach, in Maidenhead, Berkshire is the location where this service is based. Out of reach from traditional ADSL based services, the community was stranded with dial-up access or costly satellite connections. Today marks the start of change - a high speed 2Mbit wireless broadband service was made 'live' for residents to connect seamlessly to the world wide web. Using no more than a Wireless LAN adaptor (WiFi) each resident accesses the internet using a Mesh topology network, which in turn connects to a high speed wireless backbone.

Using open source technology from LocustWorld (www.locustworld.com) helped reduce startup costs, meaning PoundHost could offer broadband to a low number of residents at a very competitive price. £25 per month for a high speed 2Mbit service is one of the lowest broadband costs in the UK, for such a high speed.

The local 2.4Ghz 'mesh' network connects to a high speed 5.8Ghz backbone link over two miles, straight into the PoundHost Data centre where internet access is readily available.

Matthew Munson, Managing Director of PoundHost Internet Services said 'we are pleased to be in a position to help the local community gain a high speed internet connection. We have received praise from a number of local residents who can now easily work from home without delays introduced by normal dial-up modems, or the cost of expensive satellite based services'. 'We've also extended our coverage to a local primary school as well as areas of the River Thames and Monkey Island who were without broadband access, using our existing network as the starting point.' 'It's great to be able to utilise our resources to benefit the community in such a way.'

DorneyNet and PoundHost are to hold an official launch event, including live demonstrations and a rural Internet Café. If you would like invitations to this event, please contact us.

Contact Details:
DorneyNet Website - www.dorneynet.co.uk or www.dorneybroadband.co.uk
E-Mail: Info@dorneynet.co.uk
Telephone: 01628 777730

PoundHost Internet Services:
PoundHost Website - www.poundhost.com
E-Mail: Info@PoundHost.com
Telephone: 0870 744 1700
PO Box 2154, Maidenhead, Berkshire. SL6 0BQ
[from: JB Wifi]

Stop reading right now and take a look at your desktop. How many things are you doing right now in addition to reading this blog? Folks, this isn't multi-tasking. This is an advanced case of Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder or NADD. I am unable to function at my desktop unless I've got, at least, five things going on at the same time. If your count came close, you're probably afflicted, as well. Most excellent.

Uh, what was that? No, I can't fix your computer problem now. Can't you see I'm busy. [from: JB Ecademy]

One for the cypherpunks. Crank the paranoia level up to 10, combine weblogging software with GPG and the Mixmaster anonymous remailing system and you can post in relatively complete anonymity. Not even the site owners know who you are. Great for whistleblowing or political activism in repressive regimes.

invisiblog.com (beta) - anonymous weblog publishing [from: JB Ecademy]

A little while ago it came to light that the Linksys 54G series run Linux. Here's a report at O'Reilly Network: Linux on the Linksys [July 16, 2003] that Rob Flickenger and the NoCat crew are getting close to adding utilities to it, but need some tech information from Linksys to be able to upload their code to the box.

Rob's absolutely right when he says "If the open source community were provided technical details about your
firmware file format, I believe you would see an unprecedented interest in your 54G line. The ability to run custom Linux software on a commercial access point would certainly make it one of the most desirable access points on the market"

The question I have is whether there's enough ROM and RAM on the box to do anything useful. A lot of Locustworld's early work was similar to this but at the time the boxes that could be hacked didn't have enough resources so they went down the route of using a more general purpose PC instead.

So come on Linksys, do the right thing. You've kept to the letter of the GPL. How about making the upload parameters open as well? [from: JB Wifi]

CYBERFROST.net | Business News and Technology Reports reports on Yahoo! BB in Japan. 12Mbps for $21 per month. With dirt cheap VoIP thrown in and Video on demand over IP just starting. And they're getting 7000 new signups per day. [from: JB Ecademy]

Yesterday we had Smart Posses. Today it's Smart Flocks at FlockSmart.com

Beaahh! Beaahh! Why am I thinking about sheep with brain electrodes and laser guns attached to their backs, rampaging round the countryside? Of course, it's the feral Smart Sheep(tm) you really have to look out for. [from: JB Ecademy]

Vivato have a very interesting product. It's an electronically steerable high gain antenna combined with a switch. It effectively means that each client is served by it's own high gain antenna at the access point. In a recent demo in Spokane, they covered most of the downtown area with just 6 antennas. This ought to be very interesting to people trying to provide metropolitan WiFi access. There's quite a few of these now in Europe.

On one of the mailing lists, I recently asked whether Vivato's switches would be legal in the UK and Europe given the EIRP restrictions of 100mW. I've just been contacted by one of their people to say that approval under ETSI looks very unlikely in the next two years at least.

Yet another example of how the excessively tight ETSI regs are holding back development and deployment of WiFi in Europe.

If anyone out there can help Vivato get through ETSI or can help get ETSI relaxed, contact me and I'll put you in touch. [from: JB Wifi]

Jim Moore's Weblog writes about an idea called "Smart Posse". You've maybe heard about Smart Mobs; technologically facilitated mobs that come together quickly at short notice. You've maybe also heard of Meetup.com; a system to manage regular club meetings worldwide. Put the two together and you'd have a system for getting a handful of like minded people for some purpose at short notice. Another one in this area that never really took off was local2me; a mailing list system where you send and receive messages based on how close your zip codes/postcodes are.

Not sure if there's really something here, but I like the name [from: JB Ecademy]

The Register has a story about MyZones. These guys were at the Olympia Wifi show. They have a managed access point that lets you share your Broadband connection with neighbours. "A typical MyZones customer would have full always on 512K broadband service for two people sharing at £17.62 per month, three people for £11.74 per month, four people for £8.81 per month (all charges include VAT)." The equipment comes from Netgear and the package includes "a Wi-Fi broadband starter pack including an ADSL modem, Wi-Fi access point, a USB wireless adapter and the MyZones client software" There's also an upgrade pack for existing broadband customers but they need to "check with their existing broadband service provider if their broadband terms and conditions allow sharing" and they pay extra to use the MyZones software.

I still think there's something in here that doesn't quite ring true. [from: JB Wifi]

I hate PDFs. It seems Jakob Nielsen agrees as he's just released PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

So please don't use PDFs if you could do the same thing with HTML.

By the way, did I tell you I hate PDF?

Next on my set of pet hates, "People use Flash for things that could perfectly well be done with HTML". [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm still looking for a WYSIWYG HTML editor to use in web forms that is a direct drop in replacement for TEXTAREA. I don't mind if it's only for one browser or one browser family, but it must be a direct replacement for a TEXTAREA and must not require any other changes to the form. It would also be handy if it was:-
- Open source
- Generates good, valid xhtml
- Could limit the html tags that are allowed
- Is client side only
- No Java, thank you very much
- Ideally it ought to use standard cross browser javascript and CSS but like I said it's ok if it's for one browser family only.
- Having said one browser, I'm only really interested in IE and Mozilla (Firebird). Opera and Konqueror would be a bonus but are not necessary.

This is an old request but it's coming up again. After 10 years of browser development, I can't believe I'm still asking this question. [from: JB Ecademy]

Pirate CDs top one billion worldwide and "In 2002, the sale of pirated CD copies rose 14 percent to 1.1 billion units, and has more than doubled in the past three years, turning a street-corner trade into an estimated $4.6bn (£2.82bn) business, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said in its annual piracy report."

So why are the RIAA threatening to sue their end customers?

Could this be the reason? [from: JB Ecademy]

The Register : BT set broadband demand trigger levels for another 500 exchanges (PDF list) today. Revised targets mean means 56 exchanges will go straight into BT's ADSL upgrade programme

Which is nice. [from: JB Ecademy]

You need to see this one. Sue All The World Music Video (from the Napster Bad! Cartoon Series on Camp Chaos)

There's some nice little touches in it, like Dr Dre whispering in Eminem's ear before each line Eminem raps.

In related news, "Man bites Pig". [from: JB Ecademy]

The Supernova 2003 conference is running right now and as usual all the great and good prime movers are there.

Supernova (along with O'Reilly's recent conferences) is turning into a showcase for just how connected and wired a conference can be. Needless to say there's plenty of WiFi and the attendees are all using it. And here's what they're doing:-
- An official organiser's weblog
- A group weblog driven by trackback
- A conference Wiki
- Confab: an ad hoc conversational space
- A PhotoWiki
- Chiki: A chat session auto-archived to a wiki
- A bunch of IRC channels
- Group document editing via Hydra
- A blogroll of Speaker weblogs
- Numerous RSS feeds of all this.

Some of this is pretty experimental, but I wonder if all the tech could be bundled into a distribution and then sold to conference organisers as a managed package? [from: JB Ecademy]

I've just read Irina's post about Britney with a reference to the Russian Club in her signature. This was posted at 9:28. At 9:50 Google had these ads showing.

Kremlin Gifts Catalogue
1000's of Russian gifts by talented Russian artists. Secure, low prices

M. Lysenko "Best works"
Arias, cantatas, choir music of the famous Ukrainian composer on a CD.

How do they do that? It looks as though they're indexing pages with ads on them either as they are shown or very soon afterwards. Is this introducing a 2 tier web in the index? Pages with Google Ads are grabbed much quicker than the rest of the web? [from: JB Ecademy]

More Like This WebLog: Necho Feed - Tuesday, 08 July 2003

Look! A necho feed in the wild. Excuse me if I'm distinctly underwhelmed. It looks almost exactly like an RSS 2.0 feed with all the element names changed. Is this what all the fuss is about? Surely, there's more to it than this?

DON'T MESS WITH RSS. DON'T MESS WITH CITLD.

[edited to add]Maybe there should be a challenge. "Show something you can do with necho that you can't do with RSS 2.0"

Things to make you go hmmm? The Speedpass-enabled Timex watch is a watch with an RFID tag in it. On the surface this looks great. By giving you an electronic personal ID in the real world you can use it to pay for stuff just by waving it past a sensor. The bad news is when you get mugged. "No, you don't understand. You are going to give me the watch" [from: JB Ecademy]

I've added a feature where you can add a link to a FOAF file that is off Ecademy. If you have one, you'll know what this means. You'll also want to turn on Ecademy FOAF so that your Ecademy network can be picked up.

If you don't currently have a FOAF file and want to create one, take a look at FOAF-A-Matic.

To see the results, try my FOAF viewer or Jonathan's

If you're concerned about security with all this I'm careful not to expose anyone's email address or details unless they specifically enable it in Ecademy. [from: JB Ecademy]