Derbyshire farming community flock to faster broadband!
Tourism boost as local pub becomes a hotspot for beer and browsing
People living in and around Chinley, Derbyshire, now have some of the fastest and most reliable broadband available in the UK.
Around 20 properties from harder to reach parts of Chinley, Buxworth and Brownside – a mix of farms, cottages, and a popular rural pub - partnered with Openreach after they became frustrated with slow and unreliable speeds.
Due to their remote location, farmers were struggling to run their businesses and families couldn’t do simple things like stream movies, complete homework online, or work from home.
But after residents, Hope and Angus Morris, rallied the community together, they were soon able to get everyone to join forces with Openreach to make full fibre a reality.
“We’re delighted to finally have full fibre broadband" said local farmer Angus Morris: "For too long, we’ve been struggling with slow and unreliable internet, which has made it difficult to run our farm and stay connected to family and friends. Now, we have access to some of the fastest and most reliable broadband speeds available anywhere in the UK, and it’s making a huge difference.
“It was easy working with Openreach. The engineers were excellent and carried out the work to build the new fibre network with the minimum of disruption. We live in a beautiful area, and there is a strong tradition of sheep farming locally, going back many years. However, we need to keep moving with the times and having great connectivity is important to both sustain life as we know it, and to future-proof the way we work and communicate for a long time to come.”
Full Fibre broadband helps farmers better manage their crops, livestock and equipment, and provides a boost to those thinking of diversifying. It also plays an important role in helping farming families stay connected with friends and family.
Something that the local representative of the National Farmers’ Union, Andrew Critchlow, says is more important than ever: “With farmers, when they step outside of their house they are usually working on their own, in the yards and fields. Often in a very remote environment. From a safety point of view, good connectivity is vitally important.
“Many of the agricultural tools and machinery that farmers use also require an internet connection. They need to download and upload huge amounts of data as they submit returns to Defra[1] and download the latest guidance, which is key to day-to-day work.”
The work to make full fibre broadband available here was funded by Openreach and Derbyshire County Council as part of Digital Derbyshire – its programme to get better, faster, broadband across the county. This programme has already brought improved broadband to more than 100k properties in Derbyshire and is supporting communities in some of the most rural, hard-to-reach areas of the county to upgrade.
Derbyshire County Council’s Cabinet Member for Infrastructure and Environment Councillor Carolyn Renwick said: “Derbyshire is very rural and I myself live in a very rural area so understand and appreciate the frustrations of some of our residents who haven’t got the connectivity of some of the local towns and cities. It’s great to see areas like Chinley getting connected.”
Businesses can also use the council broadband vouchers, and one of those to get connected is The Lamb Inn, an 18th century coaching inn just outside Chinley, that has recently diversified into providing accommodation.
Landlord David Asquith said: “Before we had broadband, if we had more than two or three users, it would literally close the system down. Now we have full fibre, it means we can get it to the whole property, as well as outside. We also really wanted better broadband so people staying in our guest accommodation could connect easily. Our rating on sites like Booking.com was suffering before, and hopefully now that’s a thing of the past.”
Once approved, it took engineers about three weeks to carry out the work, building a new local full fibre network to link in with more than 20 miles of fibre cable, starting in Buxton.
The engineering work included:
· A dozen new fibre broadband connectors (known as CBTs) on existing poles
· Manually joining together more than 100 different sections of fibre cable
· Nearly 3,000 metres of new overhead cable required
· Nearly 1,000 metres of new underground cable
· Tree cutting to remove overhanging branches from the network
· Negotiating narrow one-way rural tracks with minimal disruption
Wendy Sycamore, Openreach’s Regional Engagement Manager, said: “We’re really proud of our work to connect up this community. The build was difficult at times and we had to work closely with people living there to make sure we didn’t disrupt their everyday lives. I’d like to thank our engineers and the local community for their help in making things run as smoothly as possible. It was good to go back and hear about the difference our work is making.”
More than 1,600 Openreach people live and work in the East Midlands.
[1] Defra (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) is a government department responsible for rural communities, including food, farming and fishing industries.
