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VILLAGE PLAN - A TECHNICAL COMMENTARY FROM THE
WEBMASTER
[Certainly a personal comment - separate from
the rest of this web site which tries to be impartial]
I notice from the village plan that among the sensible
suggestions are one or two unwarranted complaints, one is "Broadband
speeds are too slow" and another is "Mobile phone reception is inadequate".
Now as a "webmaster" I may not be able to comment on many
things about the village plan, and probably wouldn't want to anyway as my
family have lived here for more than 40 years and we love the village as it
is now. I know that the Green is beautiful and should remain unaltered, but
know little of new roads, litter bins or stoollball, but as an experienced
electronics engineer I do think that on such technical issues my thoughts
may be relevant.
Are present village broadband speeds too slow, and what
does "too slow" mean anyway?
If we compare our connection speeds with say Haywards
Heath then you may be interested to know that in the village we can
have as fast a connection as many "townies"! Yes in Haywards Heath some
people can connect at a full 8 or 9 Megs but many get just over 4 - that is
splendid - but right on the edge of Horsted Keynes our connection
speed is 7.4 Megs!
B.T. may not do many things right but a year or so ago
they installed what I will call a "broadband amplifier" in the green cabinet
opposite the Post Office. Wires radiate from there to many parts of the
village. There are fewer of these central amplifiers in towns as the
infrastructure is more spread out and less centralised. In Horsted
Keynes many of the telephone wires already "pointed" towards the central
cabinet so it was rather easy to put an amplifier in there which helped most
people. As all broadband signals go down the same B.T. lines it matters not
a jot if you are with B.T. A.O.L. or any other ISP, all can connect
at the same speed - if your ISP will let you. And that's the point, if.
So what do the village plan proponents expect or want? If
they expect a 50 Meg optical fibre broadband signal then they won't get it
for many, many years. If that is what they want now then they should
consider moving on - to Milton Keynes perhaps, where a very few lucky
souls do indeed get this speed connection. ;-) The rest of us can get a
perfectly adequate 4Meg or more connection right now, and it will get a bit
quicker in a year or so when the Dane Hill exchange is upgraded and
unbundled allowing other ISPs to put their equipment into that green
cabinet.
I visited a village home yesterday where they were
downloading at a mind numbing 15K. "Useless this village broadband", they
said. It took me 5 minutes to move a single wire and bring their speed up to
4 Meg - and their speed will get faster when the exchange "learns" of their
improved connection. So please don't blame the village infrastructure before
checking what is happening
inside your home. We have a proper carefully installed broadband
system from a professional ISP which costs us a shade over £20 for 60 Gig
each month, perhaps a couple of pounds more than the cheapos, but as I said
above it gives us a more than adequate speed all controlled from Worcester
in the UK, not India! In most cases you could connect at this speed too! If
you went for the cheapest supplier when you moved up to broadband
from dial up then what can you expect? What happens when your broadband goes
wrong? You shout down the phone to India who fob you off and are no help.
That's what you pay for which is fine, but please don't blame the village
infrastructure! What I suppose I am saying is that if broadband is as
important to you as it is to us then invest in a proper system, properly
installed supplied by a professional ISP. Don't get the cheapest plan from a
telephone company!
The strong broadband signals are in most cases there if
you want to use them, but if you still have the same cheapo box that came
free from your ISP several years ago and especially if you still have
filters all over your home instead of a single master socket fitted then you
are not getting the connection speeds that you are able. There is also an
exciting new product called an iPlate. This is screwed to your existing main
telephone socket and it does... nothing! Nothing immediately that is,
because if you check your connection about a week later you will find that
in many cases you are getting an extra 1Meg per second speed! It does not
work in all cases, and in new homes it is probably a waste of time, but in
older houses that have a number of telephone sockets it does seem to be very
worthwhile.
Let me add that yes there are certainly a few homes
around the village which get an appalling broadband signal, often because
they had aluminium wires put in when they had a second line installed to
work their burglar alarm. A few, perhaps 4 or 5 homes can only get the basic
minimum 512K connection, and two that we know of can get no broadband at
all. However exactly the same thing is true of Haywards Heath. In fact it is
worse over there as many of the new developments are located a long way from
a telephone exchange so whole roads get poor speeds rather than just odd
houses in our village.
Can I add a final comment - and this one really annoys
me! One of the other complaints contained in the village plan is that
there is "inadequate mobile phone reception". Fair enough, even on the Green
there is almost no signals to speak of. But err just a minute. What happened
when
Orange tried to put up a local mast that would
have given us all perfect local indoor mobile phone and mobile broadband
reception in Horsted Keynes? Instant objections and fears of cancer, nose
bleeds, childhood deformities, spontaneous cattle abortions, in fact any ill
informed opinions the objectors could find when Googling the internet.
Even though the Orange mast was going to be located less
than a quarter of a mile from and right opposite our bedroom window (in fact
we were one of the nearest houses to the proposed mast) I firmly
supported the application! You see because of the way mobile phones work
it would in fact have
reduced the radiation received by most villagers! The application was of
course quickly thrown out by the planners so the nearest masts are still
located in Lindfield and Haywards Heath and we struggle to make contact when
out. (If you'd like to see more of our comments do please click the
following link.
Orange
technical explanation )
How on earth, less than a year later, can the same
villagers who objected to a local mast complain of "inadequate mobile phone
reception". You quite simply can't have it both ways! Where should the
transmitters be sited then? "Not in my back yard" comes to mind!
p.s. Did you know that all four mobile phone companies
literally flood the village with signals every year? For the three days of
the South of England show they put in large mobile transmitters on a hill
overlooking the Ardingly showground and the signals reach over to Horsted
Keynes. That's why your signal level suddenly leapt up to five bars last
June! The phone companies do this quite legally on a temporary "show"
licence from Ofcom. If there hadn't been the objections last year we could
now have had this strength service right here every day! Along with
strong mobile phone signals comes 7.2Meg mobile broadband, which would have
been great for those homes that can't get a decent broadband service, and
would have provided a fast back-up service for the rest of us. Oh well!
Q.E.D.
Robert Philpot |
