Convergence Conversation

Back in May 2009, RNLI Humber hosted the visit of the Fibrestream-NextGenUs team and its partners.

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We had set ourselves a challenging mission to accomplish.

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Provide superfast broadband to one of the most remote-rural locations in England.

Spurn Point, located where land, river and sea meet (Yorkshire, Humber and North respectively), where RNLI Humber crew and their families are permanently based, is unsurprisingly an ADSL Notspot.

Here is the speedtest.net result from the RNLI Crew Facilities using the NextGenUs NGA FiWi Connection

Said Sean Royce, Commercial & Finance Director, Kingston Communications, on news of the service going live for RNLI Humber: More...

Check out this speedtest.net result

The NextGenUs NGA Testbed is now officially live in Hull and Humber.

This NGA Testbed Trial supports 1000 Residential Subscribers on Phase One, serving a nationally-representative range of socio-demographics and locations from Inner City Urban to Remote Rural.

Heartfelt thanks must go to Councillor John “Digibobbins” Robinson and his trusty Knowledge Manager, Steve Fleming of Hull City Council.

Let the fun commence

Just seen at London's Victoria station - a (Sandisk-branded) vending machine selling memory cards, phone acessories... and mobile broadband USB dongles. Shrink-wrapped, no cumbersome sales or registration process, no annoying salesperson trying to upsell you.

Just data connectivity, on a stick.
Like memory, on a stick.

Yes, there's still absolutely a role for contracts, retail stores, expert sales executives and so on. But solely going that route leaves money on the table when someone wants a quick transactional purchase. When I get to Victoria, I want to hail a taxi, not sign up for a cab account. More...

Last week's top Telco 2.0 news stories

• Enterprise 2.0: Salesforce.com adds social network to its cloud platform
• Online Video: iPlayer via satellite broadcast - now with added usage data
• Devices: The $30 Android phone, and the Tesco iPhone
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Hands-on with Vodafone 360
• Broadband & Fibre: "Our network is sabotaged 10 times a month"
• Telco 2.0 Event: Last chance to register for Telco 2.0 Americas

As part of the Telco 2.0 Americas event, we'll be debating the value of AppStores with American delegates to see if they differ in their views from their European counterparts, who we asked to vote on this question: More...

http://spedr.com/2b2i

Do you have an idea for a service or application that could revolutionise Digital Britain? Do you need some seed capital to help investigate the potential for your idea? If so get your fingers poised and ready to write the application letter by Oct 1 for entry into the Digital Britain competition. The total 'prize fund' for the competition is £2M with up to £25k being awarded per project which must be no more than 75% of the project cost.

According to the guidance the competition winners will be well placed to "seek investment to develop their ideas" and to enter in further competitions from the Technology Strategy Board. More...

We recently launched the COTS Project, short-hand for Commercial, Operational and Technical Standards for Independent Local Open Access Networks.

The objective of the project is:

“to work with representatives of independent local and community–led broadband projects, national network operators and major ISPs to develop a low cost standardised approach to enable a wide range of service providers to offer retail services over local or community-led open networks to end users.

As a result of this initiative consumers and small businesses should be able to access a wide choice of service providers, regardless of how the underlying infrastructure is either provisioned or owned.

More...

Following on from http://www.fibrestream.co.uk/2009/05/21/rnli-next-gen-access-challenge/ today some friends of RNLI, FibreStream’s partners Emtelle delivered the materials to site to create the passive FttH network for the RNLI Humber crew and their families.

The next step towards next gen access is to bury the microducts and for that FibreStream is Shouting Out for RNLI.

For the lifeboat crew and their families to go out “on a shout” means the RNLI crew risking life and limb to save others in trouble at sea

Here’s your chance to help them in return

Fibrestream is leading the project to provide the latest FttH (Fibre to theHome) Next Generation of ultrafast broadband (100Mbps symmetric to start off with)  in partnership with Emtelle, AFL Fujikura, AB Ports, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Steve Medcalf Builders. More...

Since announcing plans to bring fibre to the Great Thornton Street Estate in Hull, we’ve been inundated with emails asking us to do the same elsewhere in the city.

If you want us to bring service to your community, and if you can prove there is sufficient demand, then we will work to bring it to you.

What do I have to do?

You will need to show us that people in your community are interested in next-gen access so that we can direct resources to areas where there is likely to be a good take up.

How do I do it?

To start with you should talk to your neighbours to ensure that they are as interested in getting next generation broadband services as you are. More...

More Amazon orders today. Please, please, please, if you want the JFDI Community Broadband books, especially in light of what has been laid and lit in the last couple of days, order them here on Lulu.

Why? I knew you would ask that! Because Amazon want the books for cheaper than I can get them published, and because of their system, it is desperately environmentally unfriendly for me to have them shipped from the south of England (the printer for Lulu) to Cumbria, to stick in Amazon's order slip, and despatch them back down south to Amazon's warehouse. Which I can only do at a loss, both from the printing and shipping. More...