Extreme Broadband - Introduction

"One man and his mission to get broadband where BT said it wasn’t possible."

There are many great things about living in a rural area – getting broadband isn’t one of them!

Our house is only 8Km from the telephone exchange, but the telephone cable running up the side of the road is ancient and doesn’t serve enough houses for BT to consider it worth upgrading. Although we ordered broadband when our exchange was activated, the cables are just not up to the job and despite a visit from a BT engineer it simply wouldn’t work.

We tried one way satellite broadband – at about £30 per month, but the performance wasn’t great, partly due to the paltry 28k connection speed we got on our dial up modem.

We looked at two way satellite broadband, but at £1000 for installation and £60 per month it’s too expensive for a system that still has inherent speed problems due to the distance the signals have to travel to the satellite and back. Don’t get me wrong, 2 way satellite works great for many applications – like email and web surfing, but the delay makes remote applications (like Terminal Services) too slow.

We looked at setting up a wireless network from a house about 2 miles away where broadband is available, but the local geography kept putting hills in the way of the signal.

So eventually we came up with…

…Extreme broadband – a last mile solution for the really determined!

It all sounded so simple

• Install a phone line in a neighbors house about 2 ½ miles away.
• Get broadband activated on that phone line.
• Install a broadband router in my neighbors house.
• Run a cable along the road side to my house
• Connect both ends of the cable to some suitable hardware
• And Bob’s your uncle – you’ve got broadband!

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