Features

Invisible company cracks rural broadband with ordinary WiFi wireless

One day, perhaps, the ponderous machinery of Government may find a way of encouraging broadband Internet providers to supply remote villages in the UK. Richard Nuttall of Invisible Networks can't wait that long, and has started doing, while others are talking - and has a half-dozen successful installations. His secret is nothing more clever than WiFi 802.11b technology - and community networking.

He wants to install high-speed Ethernet fibre to every community. But he knows he can't do that straight away, not in remote, sparsely-populated areas. So he has come up with a stealth marketing enterprise which will create the demand. You can't see him; he's Mr Invisible.

It was something of a surprise, yesterday, when startup company ip.access announced that it was going to use existing rural broadband to provide GSM phone access to the countryside - because most of us probably didn't know there were any existing rural broadband providers. There are: and one of the most successful is Invisible.

That's its name, of course, not just its status - nobody knows it is there - and the company, founded by Richard Nuttall - the man who gave us Internet pioneer, Pipex - believes he'll have a widespread set of countryside networks before anybody else finds a way to do the same thing.

His technique is simple: find a group of villages which has potential demand for broadband Internet, find an evangelist in the community, and show them how it can be done; and then mobilise the community as a whole. And when that's done, install a 2 megabit leased line to a central point, and connect it to a network of WiFi distribution points.

The technology is fascinating enough; but Nuttall's approach is far cleverer than any amount of radiant wireless could be.

"It's the community web that makes it work," he says. "We know that ultimately, the only acceptable technology is going to be high-speed Ethernet fibre, providing 100 megabit to every household. But the point is, you can't prove that there's any demand for that - and anyway, there really isn't, not yet, because these people don't understand what it means."

The Invisible Networks web site is one of the least impressive ones you'll see. No Flash, no snazzy maps and diagrams. "That's because the bit that matters, isn't our commercial operation. It's the links from that to the individual community web sites we support which matter - so Invisible Networks is the commercial operation, but the customer focus stuff - like what are the services, how do they work, how do I sign up - are what our customers care about."

If you go to a cable company which actually has one of its cable runs passing through a small community, and say: "Can you break out a box for this village?" they will say: "No." Nuttall has tried, and he says he understands why; there's no evidence that it would pay back. There are those who say that the Government must change the law, so that such providers are forced to open up to rural communities - but nobody has yet proved that this would actually improve the situation much, while it is clear that it would cost money.

His technology is cheap. Using pretty standard equipment - which you can buy from Invisible Networks, if you really want to DIY! - you take the leased line into a central hub. From that, you take a wireless 802.11b antenna high up on the roof, using an efficient "flat" omnidirectional radiation pattern, to link up with other local nodes, which can be a surprisingly long distance apart - for example, in Cottenham, there's an Invisible network where they can jump over 7 km from one node to the next.

That signal is protected; only other nodes can pick it up. They distribute the signal to each other, and also to local radiants which have a conical pattern, "shining down" from the roof-tops to the houses below. This is then picked up by subscriber houses, where the service provided is actually not wireless; it's an Ethernet port looking exactly like any other sort of broadband. If you want wireless LAN inside your house, you connect your own AP to this Ethernet port, the same way as any ADSL or cable customers would do.

But the clever bit is the way Nuttall sets about getting the sale made. "We find an activist, essentially. Someone in the community, who wants broadband enough that he's prepared to work with us. And then we do a community lobbying job. We produce leaflets for him. We set up a community web site - the Cambridge Ring West for example, or the Martlesham Heath Broadband sites are good examples."

And then it's politics. They book a hall, and organise a meeting. Invisible Networks funds it; the activist leads it. "Come along and discover how to get always-available Internet!" is the call. And Nuttall says, it can be very successful. "In the six villages near Arundel, I think, we had a 10% response from the local communities - that's truly incredible - one in ten of the population showed up."

The network there is going live; but it's not just broadband he's selling. It's the whole village community, and much of the traffic over the local wireless network will, in fact, never go back along the leased line. "We get a lot of response initially from people who know and understand the technology. For example, someone who lives in one village, and works in another, will get it straight away; he can link home and office over 11 megabit wireless, which can be a great deal quicker than the 512K you'd get from ADSL over the Internet."

Quickly, Nuttall believes, the need shifts to the ordinary, non-specialist members. "The problem is, people in this business are selling features. They need to explain benefits. BT Openworld is currently spending a fortune advertising "always on" and "high speed" and most people have no idea what the good of this is to them. We find that if you say "always there" they understand better. We promote the idea that you can have your notebook in the kitchen, and keep adding orders to your Tesco shopping list, without having to log off and then boot up again. Then they understand."

The need for traffic quickly grows, and the 2 megabit leased line runs out of capacity. "That's not a problem, that's part of the plan."

It's hard to go to someone and say: "Lend me money to install broadband in this village" without some evidence of demand. It's far, far easier to go to the same person and say: "We have broadband in this village, and demand is exceeding our ability to provide it - we need to expand, and the revenue will rise by this much ... !"

"The same cable company which simply turns you down when you first ask to have a breakout of their fibre under the village, will be taking a completely different view when you go back a year later and say: "We have six villages, and ten users in each village, and we have enquiries from another 50 who will want more than just Internet, if only they can get it," explains Nuttall.

"Yes, in the end, 100 megabit Ethernet will be all you can get away with; nobody will want less in ten years," agrees Nuttall. "But you can't go out and try to install high-capacity fibre without some estimate of demand. We have the whole community joined together, and talking each other into higher demand."

"Broadband is really about personal empowerment, as the Internet was. So we are de-skilling it to the point where you put it in the box and it works; most Internet equipment is too easy to break when people set it up. After that, it's just a question of understanding the different things that make other members of the community - not hugely technical - understand benefits of broadband to them."

He believes that this will pull 3G into life, too. "Long term, the 3G operators will have the same difficulty making a business case for making big masts on rural areas, with no idea of how they'll be getting money back; our focus is on building networks in precisely those areas, where the big telco model has said we can't make a case. We can deliver the community network; and then people like IP.Access can bring the base station down to something so small that 3G people can get a toe in the water. This is building the business case to put fibre into everybody's home. You couldn't do that to a remote community now! - but you can say: "we'll deliver a steadily increasing bandwidth."