UK project explores community-owned ‘DIY’ broadband

A pilot in London next year will explore the feasibility of a community-owned internet service. It will cover not only the technical aspects of setting up and maintaining a broadband service but also issues such as governance, permitting, regulation and customer support.

The project is led by Promising Trouble, a social enterprise focused on community technology, and supported by Impact on Urban Health, which is part of Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation.

The initiative aims to address internet affordability but also diversify the market, give people more power over technology, and provide technical skills and jobs.

“There are two camps: there are people who get really excited about it and then there are people who say we’re crazy,” says Rachel Coldicutt, founder and Executive Director of Promising Trouble.

Cost pressure

Affordability is one of the factors that keeps people unconnected.

Around 1.7 million UK households have no broadband or mobile internet access at home, including 270,000 in London. Around a fifth cite cost as a reason for being offline, and up to 1 million people have cut off their broadband access due to the cost of living crisis.

Although there are social tariffs in the UK, which cost between £12 and £20 a month (US$15 to US$25), awareness and uptake is low, and speeds are often slower.

In addition, millions don’t meet the benefits threshold to qualify but still face affordability issues.

“Particularly in an urban environment, your access to a good life, good health, good work and cheaper goods is all contingent on being online,” says Coldicutt.

Another of Promising Trouble’s goals is to better democratise technology.

“At the moment, it’s big tech’s world and we’re just living in it,” Coldicutt comments.

“We’re really interested in how you can liberate that capability, move it into communities, and use some of the original principles and ideas of the internet, which were all about distributing capabilities and making more people able to do things and shape their own tech.”

Pilot

The 18-month project takes inspiration from initiatives elsewhere such as Community Tech New York, NYC Mesh, and Guifi in Spain, and will be designed around local needs.

The programme will launch a home broadband pilot in 2024, offering a free or very low cost, high quality service for people excluded by affordability.

The pilot will be in the borough of Southwark or Lambeth, where Impact on Urban Health focuses its work, and based on analysis of which neighbourhoods are most excluded.

The team is researching technology solutions that would be most suitable in various residential settings, such as using existing cabling, 4G or a virtual network operator model.

Promising Trouble plans to partner with a local community organisation to co-develop and roll out the pilot service.

The team hopes to get a demonstrator up and running that reaches around 500 households. Eventually, the goal would be to share best practices or a playbook for others to set up their own community-owned service but Coldicutt says there’s lots to learn before then.

“For now, the most important thing is to make it really work in one neighbourhood and then if that happens, I hope we can help create a bit of a movement around it. But I think getting it working in one place really well is more important than saying we’ve solved it for everywhere.”

Selecting, procuring and installing the technology for such a project is challenging, she says, but it’s not the hardest part. Trickier areas are regulatory issues, governance, equity, payments and repairs.

“They’re the things that will either bring a community together or drive them up the wall so I think it’s really important to get that right,” Coldicutt comments.

“But I think it’s all possible.”

Promising Trouble also helps other community organisations create their own technology, such as a newspaper, pub, food delivery service, and energy co-operative.

Its sister organisation, Careful Industries, provides research and consultancy about the social impacts of technology.