Best thing since sliced megabites

Surfing the net without wires, Mark Harrison taps into his laptop outside St. Michael's which houses the radio transceiver (Pictures: Charles Round)

So you wanna do broadband? If you live in the Upper Calder valley, why not check out the local broadband co-op? says Tim Power in the Halifax Evening Courier, 28th September 2004

SQUINTING a bit, and looking very carefully, I can just about make out a tiny object, high up on the tower of St Michael's Church.

"That's the radio transmitter-receiver which makes this area a hotspot", explains Mark Harrison, as he fires up his laptop and starts surfing the net wirelessly while sitting outside the Riverside Cafe at Mytholmroyd.

With a cuppa to hand, he soon persuades a sceptical hack that wireless broadband is the best thing since sliced megabites.

All you need is a laptop, a USB transceiver and an account wth 3-C CoOp, the local provider.

3-C is a pioneering organisation. It is believed to be Britain's first indie broadband provider, a non-profit co- operative formed by Upper Valley enthusiasts determined to get - and control - their own cheap broadband.

People like computer wizard Mark Harrison and infor- mation scientist Dr Anne Handley wanted to improve internet services around Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd. First they campaigned for broadband from BT.

BT first said it would only gear up the local exchange if 500 people signed up.

Todmorden got broadband in the autumn of 2002, but a year later Hebden Bridge, a hotbed of homeworkers and media folk, was still waiting.

"We realised that BT and other ISPs did not really care about their customers in this area.

"We thought we could provide a better service ourselves," explains Mark Harrison. "BT didn't reckon on the tenacity of people in the valley.

"It was a cat and mouse game. I feel BT were overstretched in their ability to deliver broadband through ADSL (asymetric digital subscriber line) so they set high trigger levels to slow things down and gain market leverage."

The trigger level set by BT was "a fiction", in his personal opinion, which would stampede people into signing up with BT.

But BT clearly underestimated the gung-ho attitude of Hebden and Mytholmroyd folk.

When the co-op founders started to talk about putting their own broadband kit into the local exchange - under the legal option of "local loop unbundling" - BT very quickly dropped their trigger level from 500 to 300 customers.

A year on and the co-op now has nearly 500 members, of whom half are hooked up to broadband. It has also just taken on its first employee, co-ordinator Ian Clarke. In short, 3-C CoOp is on a roll, rolling out broadband.

But why go for a small local ISP? What are the advantages? Dr Anne Handley believes the free helpline, the local volunteers and the non-profit nature of the co-op make 3-C very atttractive to new members.

We are a virtual ISP and we are a co-op keen on community-run projects. We are not profit greedy," says Dr Handley, chair of the co-op and mother of two teenage girls, who works from home in Mytholmroyd.

"We soon realised that although we were connecting people to broadband through 3-C, what was really happening was that we were connecting people to each other,"she says. Like Mark, she has a visionary idea of broadband.

Both talk of future potential like "streaming" live coverage of local events or using webcams and voice-over IP to provide videophone services. "We want to encourage people to use local services, buy local skills", says Dr Handley. She explains that 3-C costs £20 a month, with a £130 sign-up fee which pays for the modem and installation costs. The sign-up cost seems high but BT apparently charge £220 for an engineer's home visit to install broadband.

Customers who go for 3-C wireless broadband pay only £15 a month and 3-C believe their prices are very competitive compared with other broadband providers like Wanadoo, BT and AOL. Plus there is no limit on download.

Best of all, according to Anne and Mark, copper broadband - through telephone lines - is a high bandwidth of 512 kilobytes per second. Some of the bigger providers give only half that bandwidth.

And if customers go for the wireless option, using a local hotspot transceiver like the one on St Michael's, they can get a stonking 1 megabyte bandwidth.