The discussion kicked off with one of the key questions facing potential community networks: what are the people in the community going to use the network for? The answers included the usual suspects: telephone, broadband and TV. Optional extras were a community-focused website, telehealth (monitoring heart patients remotely was given as an example), femtocells (a mini base station that picks up your mobile phone signal and pipes it over the broadband connection to boost reception at home), community video surveillance and smart metering.

The “killer app” in this myriad of possibilities is simply reliable broadband. (There’s a talk tomorrow about this, and the dangers of over-engineering the network with so-called value-added services.) The greatest demand for community networks comes from people who can’t get basic 2 Mbps broadband. However, the additional services can be an incentive for a public body such as a school or hospital to get involved, which creates a new source of income for the network, and a stronger social argument for obtaining funding.

The next piece in the puzzle is community engagement. A small but dedicated team will be needed to establish the viability of the project. The teams that have the greatest chance of success are those with a champion, someone who is absolutely passionate about the project, and has been there from the beginning. The rest of the team needs a variety of skills: accountant, lawyer, technical, marketing and communications, and market research.

Getting the support of the wider community is also key to success: not only does the business case depend heavily on getting end-users to sign up, landowners, local authorities and others need to be on-side when it comes time to roll out the infrastructure (more on that later).

Before that comes the planning stage. Good data on the copper access network is available from www.samknows.com, which can be combined with maps and other statistics to help build up a picture of the community’s requirements, says Adrian Wooster, technical director of CBN.

It’s important to understand the community, how many people there are, where they live, who they get their existing telecoms services from, and how much they’re prepared to pay; but asking the right questions can be tricky. “If you make it too easy for people to say yes, then when you need to get money out of them, [they’re not interested] and then the business model falls apart,” Wooster said.

Rutland Telecom, a small telecoms company that does sub-loop unbundling (installing its own equipment in a streetside cabinet), overcame this problem by asking customers for a deposit, which was held in escrow until the network became operational. “50 people [in Lyddington] gave us a deposit,” said Mark Melluish, co-founder of Rutland Telecom. “We made it pleasant, booked an evening in the village hall, provided canapés, and asked people to bring their chequebooks.”

Talk then turned to funding from a variety of possible sources, starting with the EU’s €1 billion for broadband, through national and local government, charities and the national lottery, banks and benevolent individuals, ending with the community itself, through a community shares program.

There were conflicting views on the subject of state aid. “It’s not a big deal to put public money in providing you have the right financial structure and the right network structure [open access],” said Steve Spillane, a director of CBN. But John Lloyd from Carmarthenshire County Council pointed to the FibreSpeed project to connect up businesses in Wales: 6 years, 11 months and 3 weeks were “spent arguing between lawyers and the Assembly in the EU”, and that’s why the project has progressed so slowly. It was planned in 2002; seven years later only four business parks have been connected. Others thought that now the precedents for public funding of fibre networks had been set, future state aid approvals would get processed much faster.

The final challenge in the pre-operational phase of the network is the actual network roll out. (Presumably somewhere along the line, a decision has to be made about what technology to deploy, but this fell outside the scope of the workshop.) Kevin Wood, team leader for Cybermoor, which is connecting a school into its network using fibre, described “how to dig holes and fill them in again” – in Cybermoor’s case they trained a local contractor, who was able to deliver the service much more cheaply than the national average. The technology for digging in the fibre or duct is well established, the problematic parts are planning the route, obtaining permissions and wayleaves, and dealing with unforeseen obstacles, says Wood.

I’d like to thank INCA for inviting me to NextGen09.