RASP News
We've moved forward significantly this year, and need community input on how much further we should go.
In brief: we have now established a 100Mb fibre link from Reach directly into the national web backbone. We are currently renting 10Mb of this, but with a few more members could go for a significant increase.
With our current technology we aim shortly to have everyone enjoying a minimum of 3.5Mb speed for both uploading and downloading. Many members already have more. With a modest further investment we aim to have everyone enjoying a minimum of 5Mb up and down. As a reminder, despite all the literature through the letterbox, reality of other providers is between 2Mb and 4Mb down, and half a meg up if you are lucky. This is a simple reality of what the old copper-wire based services can provide. Our fibre optic based service can out strip this significantly.
With another 25 members we could up our bandwidth to 30Mb and have everyone enjoying a 20Mb speed. This is what people in main UK cities enjoy, but something we have little hope of receiving from BT for the foreseeable future, not least now that the Government has cut back its funding on developing broadband services for rural areas, which is an uneconomic task for commercial entities like BT.
For many, the basic service that BT can provide down the existing copper wires is all they need to access and send simple emails. But if you want to use services like BBC iPlayer, or if we want to pursue a greener agenda which allows for more business to be done from home or from businesses in the villages, then what RASP provides on a not-for-profit, unpaid community self-help basis... deserves much greater attention and proactive support than perhaps it currently receives.