Rural geek gets rambly.
I live near to Hennock. By one of those common quirks of copper, I'm at the end of a very long phone line that starts at Bovey's exchange, despite Chudleigh's actually being closer. Despite that, I remember clearly the excitement when our ADSL router light lit up green in around 2002, ending dialup on 56k, and then home highway on 64k - giving us an always-on 512kbit connection. Heady days.
Roll forwards 13 years, and we were stuck with 2mbit down and 0.6 up. I'd done what I could - including renting a second line and adsl connection, and load-balancing using a clever router.Â
FTTC is still a distant dream for us out here. Our local cabinet is not even under consideration, since a commercial company has registered an interest for "alternative provision" at Teign Village, which is around the corner from us. I know that's wifi mounted on a friend's house, but they weren't able to provide me with a signal from there (hill in the way) and their packages had a 100gbit/mo cap, and still cost a lot more than dsl.Â
Then a few weeks ago, I came across another company -
airfibre.co.uk (Torbay Telecom) - based in Chudleigh, offering wifi. Uncapped monthly fees of Â25 - same as dsl, and potential of "Up to 30mbit". Feeling cynical but desperate, and rebelling somewhat at the Â300 installation fee - I put in an order.Â
The engineer visited yesterday. Strapped an aerial to my chimney, a black box in the loft and went away. He'd explained that a new aerial had gone live on Haldon that morning, and pointed it out to me. (Next to Buller's Hill forestry offices). There was clear line of sight, and he was confident it would work, but couldn't activate me. He left, saying it would "come live tonight or tomorrow". The cpe kit is Ubiquiti and good quality.
So I sat back and set a vm to route via this new gateway, endlessly pinging 8.8.8.8.... Nothing that night, and this morning I had to go out. When I returned - google's dns was responding! And with pings in the low teens. The same excitement I felt back when ADSL first switched on for us.!
Obviously the first thing I did was run some speedtests. Results are below, but way beyond my expectation. Pinging showed one dropped packed after 30 minutes - so a stable connection too. Today's light and medium rain hasn't affected it at all.
Below are some pictures of the install, and the aerial which is 6km away by my reckoning. The engineer was also confident that if I chose another package, the technology would be good for their full 200mbit, but obviously that would cost a lot more.Â
As one currently very happy customer, I can recommend this if you've also been let down by the other technologies and BT's sporadic rollout (I've seen many Cornish hamlets with FTTC that only benefit a few houses - gotta love subsidies!). Obviously it will depend on geography, but for me it's working very well so far.
