Plenty of activity last week but no blog!

John Bevan and Ben Hadler were kept busy all last week as NextGenUs (in the form of Jon, Craig and Mike) descended on the village to see how many more client devices they could install.  All the while I was away on holiday enjoying the hot sunshine and the sights of the Nile!

The team did extremely well, managing to install 27 NanoStations for subscribers, despite very challenging weather that culminated in deep snow.  The latter put an end to any climbing on roofs and will do until it finally melts and the roofs are safe again.  On Tuesday of this week I started to assess progress and establish what remained to be done.  That afternoon Craig turned up and we went round to six locations to complete the connections and configure the Nanos.  On Wednesday Graham Parkin kindly helped me complete the cabling on one house where, due to the worsening weather the previous Friday, Jon had had to beat a hasty retreat from the roof and leave the cable up there. There have been one or two teething problems but generally the new network appears to be working well.

Not a roof for climbing on!

Next week we are due to meet with the suppliers of our backhaul (the connection from the Village Hall back to the internet) to negotiate additional bandwidth.  Currently the plan is to increase it to 8Mbps at which point subscribers will certainly notice the difference from the old network.

Some 17 subscribers are still using the old network and we have a few new subscribers also waiting to be connected.  NextGenUs hoped to complete these connections before Christmas but this is very dependent on the weather which does not look like improving anytime soon.  It is also dependent on us installing new nodes at Goodlie Hill and Maisongill.  We are currently working out the best ways of delivering power to these locations which are remote from any mains supply.  It will not be easy as the power requirements of a node made up of several Nanos are much greater than those of a single mesh-box on the old system.

Now that we have 39 subscribers on the new network we have to ensure that it is properly managed and maintained in good working order.  We shall look to NextGenUs to provide expert remote support but also to train local people such as Ben and myself to provide day to day support.  Due to the failure of the old church mesh-box and the urgent need to get a lot of subscribers onto the new network quickly, we will not be in a position to undertake the orderly switchover from the old to the new network that was originally planned.  We now need to do some work to get effective support arrangements in place as soon as possible.  In the meantime we hope that subscribers will bear with us if we are not able to resolve issues and problems immediately.