What is B4RN?
It’s registered as a non-profit community benefit society and run by a dedicated local team with the support of landowners and volunteers.
B4RN offers 1,000Mbps broadband to every property in the coverage area, costing households just £30 per month.
Unlike other providers, B4RN does not use copper lines to reach customer’s properties. The gigabit network is entirely fibre optic and entirely B4RN community owned. None of this would be possible without the support of the investors, volunteers and landowners who make B4RN what it is. Read more about this on B4RN’s community pages.
As well as making the internet better for us today, B4RN is great for the local economy and community going into the future. Hyperfast broadband allows companies to flourish in rural locations, meaning that over time we will see more investment in our area, and more of our young people choosing to stay here and make great careers for themselves. In other words, it can help keep our community together, preserving our identity and culture.
The internet, home entertainment, constant Zoom meetings – and all of them happening at the same time. These are now facts of our lives. But traditional internet speeds can’t keep up. And as the technology develops, the bandwidth demand goes up too.
In many spheres of our lives, what we ‘need’, what we ‘want’ and what ‘puts a great big grin on our face’ are often very different things. How we relax in the evening or spend our precious downtime on the weekend is personal to each of us, and, as time progresses, connectivity is unarguably evolving and enriching many of these experiences.
Connected devices are already rife within our homes and even if we can’t predict exactly what our personal digital environments will look like in 20 years’ time, past experience tells us that technology won’t stand still. And, without gigabit-capable fibre connections ready to underpin those inevitable advances, woe betide any ‘regular’ user! Let alone one who finds themselves living with someone whose spare time is spent immersing themselves in the latest gaming experience.
Gigabit broadband can easily support the entertainment, communication and technology desires of home owners. Gigabit speed networks also have a vital role to play in supporting more basic human needs. Three examples are digital health, social care and remote learning. These are areas that local governments are now targeting as part of their digital agendas. As the technologies in these areas advance, the services deployed will become wholly dependent on ubiquitous high-speed fixed and wireless connectivity
The backbone of our network spans the length and breadth of the UK. We connect our ‘Supernode’ cabinets into this network to branch out and connect our communities, and demand has had us expand rapidly in all directions. When a new community on the edge of our coverage area wishes to be connected, we ask them to raise investment and gain support to cover the expansion alongside grant support from the Rural Gigabit Connectivity Scheme. With the help of local volunteers and landowners we establish viable routes and wayleaves, then lay small 16mm ducts in that new area either by trench or mole-ploughing. Fibre optic cable is then fed down these ducts in a process called ‘blowing’.
Often we will need to site a ‘node’ cabinet in the new community; these are custom built secure outdoor enclosures and usually sited on the grounds of a Village Hall or local school, the cabinet hosts will get free service in return, and we of course pay for the power the cabinet uses. These local nodes are always connected by two feeds into the wider network, offering resilience and continued service even if one of the feeds is interrupted.
Further 16mm ducts are installed around the community to a number of inconspicuously buried chambers in which we place junction boxes called ‘bullets’. From these bullets a very small 7mm duct is laid to each and every property requesting service. Once fibre is blown into this duct and its connections ‘spliced’, a property can go live at 1000Mbps!
Most of our ducts are laid deep under agricultural land, but we regularly license roadworks where necessary, cross railways, motorways, canals and have even crossed under the Lune with Environment Agency approved directional drilling.
We can continue expanding the B4RN network to many times its current size with no compromise to the quality or speed of users’ connections. This is due to the amazing bandwidth capacity of fibre, and the professional, world class design of our network.
Currently gigabit broadband is not widely available in the UK. BT is gradually rolling out fibre but there is no guarantee of when (or if) it will come to our neck of the woods. At present the very best BT service – which we can’t get even if we wanted it! – costs £60 a month. That’s twice the cost of B4RN. And there’s no government cap on BT’s fibre services, meaning the prices can go up whenever they like. With B4RN it stays at £30 a month unless the shareholders (who are made up of B4RN users) vote to change it at the Annual General Meeting.
How do we get it?
Over 200 households have already registered interest (you can do that here), and we have a draft cabling plan. But now the real work starts…
In order to be viable, B4RN needs approximately 60% of the local community to be using the service. Since it’s both cheaper (than most) and miles better (than all) other internet providers, there’s no reason why 100% of our community shouldn’t get on board. In fact, in most areas served by B4RN, that’s exactly what has happened.
So we need to spread the word. If you’re reading this (and you are!)…
Click on the register interest link now, and get yourself signed up. There’s no financial commitment, and you don’t need to take further action until the project gets the final green light. But registering allows B4RN to apply for the government grants that allow them to purchase the infrastructure that is needed to start the project.
Tell your friends to do the same thing. Anyone who’s ever complained about internet speed will benefit from the B4RN service. Email them! Call them! Whatsapp them! But get them to come to this website and sign up.
B4RN’s cabling travels through fields, not under roads. So it can be done quickly, cheaply, and without inconveniencing local transport.
In order to do this, we need to get permission from the owners of the land. B4RN relies massively on the generosity and help of landowners and farmers. There is only one way we can build an affordable network, connecting even the most rural properties, and that is with their local knowledge, assistance and free wayleave permissions.
And it’s not just landowners. Tenants will also be consulted and involved in determining the final routing of the cable as their knowledge of the land they work is unique and priceless.
B4RN’s wayleave agreement is a simple single page, plain English document that gives us permission to install B4RN ducts across a landowner’s property. We are very grateful for these free wayleaves as it is the only way a network of B4RN’s scale can be built by a community.
Does the draft proposed cabling plan go through your land? If so, please let us talk to you. Contact the team or go directly to B4RN’s wayleaves page and follow the instructions there.
This link will take you to a Google Maps plan of Hawkshead and Claife parishes, showing all the properties and the shape of the area that will be covered by our B4RN project.
The cabling routes will be designed to connect all of these properties. B4RN have already created a draft plan for cabling. At present this is just a desktop job, and before we reach the final dig it will be subject to discussions with landowners, alterations and tweaks due to everything from watercourses to unexpected cowsheds.
B4RN uses three main techniques for laying the cable: Mole Ploughing, Impact Mole, and Underground Drilling. Fortunately, all of these methods are extremely ‘light touch’. They leave almost no sign that anything has happened, and they do not have any detrimental effect on the land. The cable is buried 18 inches deep, and the trench that is created, and then covered up, is just one to two inches wide. Click Here for some videos of the three methods in action…
Financial Matters
The service itself, 1 Gigabit per second upload and download: £30 per month.
A useful additional point to bear in mind here: the bandwidth is also ample to cover VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) in place of your normal telephone line, so people can switch to a VOIP provider, which is in most cases cheaper than conventional landlines. See our page on Using B4RN for your phone service for more on this.
Connection fee: one-off payment of £150. This is waived if the premises is a business. (The business waiver does not apply to rented-out holiday homes unless they are also the offices of the business.)
The cost of digging the trench from your own boundary into your house. This can range from nothing at all to whatever a local workman might charge.
For full details of costing, please visit B4RN’s own costs page.
There are no other charges. However, most importantly, the project cannot get off the ground without at least some members of the community making a financial investment in B4RN.
Nobody is obliged to make an investment, and you can still have the service either way. But it does need a healthy proportion of people to contribute.
Individuals who choose to do so can make a minimum investment of £100 and a maximum of £100,000 – a rule that is set by the Financial Conduct Authority.
B4RN shares can only ever be traded back to B4RN.
Each shareholder also receives one vote to be used at the annual AGM, no matter how much they invest.
The shares must be held for a minimum of three years.
Each year the investment will receive a dividend of 5%. This can either be taken annually or reinvested.
Additionally, investments of £1500 will benefit from getting free connection (ie not having to pay the £150 connection fee).
So essentially this is like a deposit account that attracts 5% per annum, and you have to keep it it for minimum 3 years. At the moment that’s an extremely healthy rate of return, so it sounds pretty attractive.
Of course, you would be well advised to take independent financial advice before making investments.
There are many options when it comes to using VOIP. Ideally you might want to keep your existing phone number, and many suppliers allow you to do this.
Another B4RN project has done an extensive study of current VOIP options, and they are extremely competitive compared to traditional copper land lines. The following link takes you to the website of the B4RN project (now up and running) in the area north of Kendal, so the local details are relevant to their project. But the telephone-related information is the same: explore the whole range of phone options here.