Reach and Swaffham Prior Community Network
Bandwidth Upgrade
After a long struggle with NTL we now at last have a new service which can provide up to 10 Mb/s (in both directions!).
You can't have all of it quite yet, because some of our members still have legacy connection hardware which needs modification or replacement, which is our first priority. We are working to get all existing users up to an interim speed of around 3.5Mb/s; which is a huge improvement on the original service and better in practice than BT can deliver to most subscribers in our area.
When we have achieved that (another couple of weeks) we start on upgrading our backbone links from the fibre connection in Reach, to make them all capable of handling at least twice our existing service. When this is done we will be able to deliver around 6Mb/s to many of our subscribers, and take advantage of any further fundamental bandwidth improvement we can negotiate with NTL.
All this costs time and money; we are in the fortunate position of having some capital reserves accumulated over the years from the generosity and commitment of current and former users who have supported this community project in practical ways from the early days when we were the only available supplier. By the time our current plans are completed, we will have spent nearly £10,000 and over 1000 manhours of volunteer labour, all without a single penny from any outside source (Government please note).
We are very proud of RASP, which can provide a better service in our three villages than any commercial provider, for a simple monthly subscription with no minimum contract period, and local technical support. If we can attract some more users, we can rebuild our reserves and haggle for more bandwidth. Spread the word.