B4RN and the inspiring Christine Conder were featured in The Economist recently, well worth a read.
It’s great to see that the B4RN project has sold shares worth more than £1m to buy ducts and cables for volunteers to install in our local parishes:
FUSION splicing is a technique network engineers use to string together optical fibres. It is not a skill that Christine Conder, a 60-year-old farmer’s wife, ever expected to learn. But with borrowed tools and a little training most people can pick up the basics. “It’s only like knitting,” she says.
For years Mrs Conder and her neighbours in the Lune Valley, in rural Lancashire, waited for telecoms firms to upgrade their sluggish internet connections. In 2011 they decided to do it for themselves. Their organisation, called Broadband for the Rural North (B4RN), has sold shares worth more than £1m ($1.7m) to buy ducts and cables for volunteers to install. Because younger residents are commonly busy with jobs and families, local pensioners have done much of the digging, says Mrs Conder: “Some are getting sixpacks for the first time in years.”
Read the rest of the article here: