R&SP Community Network
The First Annual General Meeting of the Reach and Swaffham Prior community
broadband project, now renamed "R&SP Community Network" so that
the name fits in the bank's computer, was held at Reach Community Centre on
Wednesday 10th September. A committee of 4 from Reach and 3 from Swaffham Prior
was elected:
- Mr D Summers (Re) Chair
- Mr M Goodchild (Re) Vice Chair
- Mr R Hollingsworth (SP) Treasurer
- Mr B Short (Re) Secretary
- Mrs J Aspin (Re)
- Mr G Cotner (SP)
- Mr J Matheson (SP)
The wording of the constitution, member's agreement and service agreement was agreed and these will be recirculated to members. Ian Hill and Dave Summers were granted honorary life membership in recognition of their work in starting the project and subsequently providing much of the technical support.
Ian Hill then gave a talk explaining the implications of Drakken's takeover by Mistral. Mistral have agreed to continue to provide the project's connection to the rest of the Internet at a special preferential rate. Some of the equipment formerly provided by Drakken for the project will become the project's property (and responsibility). This will allow the project to run its own email and web server.
After the Treasurer's report (outlook good) there was a lively and very useful discussion of connection charges with these being agreed at:
- Initial Installation: £250 (standard) or £300 (high gain aerial)
- Monthly rental (home or business): £20
- Guaranteed bandwidth option: £75/month/64kbit
- High usage fee: £5/Gbyte over standard 5Gbyte monthly allowance
- Extra IP address: £10/month
- Extra email address: £10 one-off fee (after initial 2 free)
- Special firewall settings (eg for Web servers): £10 one-off fee
The most controversial issues were whether business and home users should be charged the same (yes) and how to prevent excessive use either by businesses avoiding paying for the guaranteed bandwidth option or home users who might degrade the service available to everyone else (high usage charge introduced).