Our minimum shareholding in B4RN is £100, and that is too much for some people, and we have been asked if we could allow smaller donations. We had a think, and we put a donate button on the site where you can donate anything you like, from a pound or a dollar to a million…<p>
Then, during a conversation with Ken Fallon on a radio podcast the idea of sponsorship was born. The plan so far, is that for a donation of £5 you can sponsor a metre of our fibre duct. In return we put your name on a metre of duct and take a photo of it. Your metre of the B4RN network with your name on it will be buried on a Lancashire upland farm for posterity, and your generosity will enable another metre to be laid in our community network.

Getting high-speed internet to the rural north, literally a metre at a time. What's really needed is for Ed Vaizey to change the ludicrous charging tariff on fibre so it's economic to lay and light it.

Obvious, but the stats are blunt:

Today over 36% of the UK population work from home or on the move. The SME and self-employed sector generate nearly 20% of the GDP. Their laptops, tablets and smartphones are more powerful that the first Cray Super Computer in 1976. And next year they will be even more powerful, whilst their need to connect and get into The Cloud will also be even greater.

Thousands of people across East Yorkshire will benefit from some of the fastest broadband in Britain. Hull telecoms provider KC has revealed new fibre cables will provide 15,000 homes and businesses with "lightning fast" broadband.

It has so far only been trialled in 350 homes in Woodmansey and the Great Thornton Street area of west Hull. The average top speed currently provided by KC's internet provider Karoo is ten megabits per second. But the new network offers speeds of up to 100 megabits per second.

This allows users to download a music album in just two seconds, an hour-long television show in 31 seconds and a high-definition film in one to two minutes.

What we really want is a way to <em>watch</em> a film in two minutes. Now that would be an advance in technology.

"Geo Networks Ltd has announced the reluctant decision to withdraw from the BDUK [Broadband Delivery UK] Broadband Framework and future Next Generation Access procurements.

"The lengthy press release on the Geo website explains the firm's reasoning, but while complaining about BT and its ability to exploit a pre-existing fibre backbone, withdrawing from the BDUK process and future NGA procurements is almost handing BT a victory without BT having to work for it."

This is bad because it reduces the diversity of companies offering high-speed connectivity to areas beyond cities. Jeremy Hunt and Ed Vaizey really need to get on top of this: BT is going to dominate this hugely important market unless they do. And that means a privatised monopoly. Where's the EC's antitrust team when you need them?

"The ITU "Measuring the Information Society" report came out a week ago, and you'd think the Brits would be celebrating, but it seems to have fallen under the radar a little. <br />
"Hardly surprising when on p.95-6 comes an outright lie about broadband in Britain which can only have skewed all the results for the UK. Whoever is responsible for feeding such untruths to OECD (from whom the data appears to have been supplied to ITU) deserves never ending sleepless nights and karmic payback on a level approaching bankers' bonuses.<br />
"'While in 2010, Germany and UK had similar fixed-broadband penetration rates, 59 per cent of the United Kingdom's were above 10Mbit/s, compared with only 30% per cent in Germany. Indeed, in the United Kingdom, 99% of all subscriptions are above 2Mbps'".<br />
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When you think about it, that doesn't sound likely.

"Here you can find lists showing the estimated availability dates for exchanges up and down the country, and details of how to get super-fast broadband. If you can't see your exchange on any of the lists keep checking as they are updated regularly and are the single source of information about our national roll out."<br />
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Would it have *killed* you to have an RSS feed, BT?

Astonishingly, the UK's average upload speed is lower than that for Zimbabwe. Intriguing data set, fun tools.

The key thing here is the graph, which illustrates why pretty much all internet startups pre-2005 that needed a fast connection to home users flopped.

"While there are sceptics about the whole ‘East London Tech City‘ project, I do know that there is a big appetite to nurture this industry. Nothing happens over night, but at least we’ve started.<br />
"However, one thing I have been banging the table about – increasingly angrily as the weeks and months have past – is the provision for broadband to startups in London.<br />
"Time and time again startups are telling me that while they can deal with hiring people, deal with finding lawyers and partners and VCs, what they can’t deal with is the achingly slow response times of broadband service providers."