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NTL Wireless Broadband Pilot

This page contains the latest news on the Milton Keynes Council's Wireless Pilot.

Please also check the council's official web page.

Plug to be pulled 20th September 2004

12/8/04
Web Announcement:

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: NTL WIRELESS BROADBAND TRIAL

ntl today informed the Milton Keynes Council and the 90 people taking part in its wireless broadband trial of its decision not to launch this service commercially.

The company announced on 24 March that a final decision regarding the possibilities of extending the wireless broadband trial in Milton Keynes would be made this summer. Since then thorough analysis and consideration has been given to this trial and its technology.

Unfortunately, the trial showed that while the 90 trial customers were satisfied with the service overall, a full commercial service would be unsustainable. The company has therefore decided to end this trial and not launch a full commercial service.

As a result, the wireless Internet service will end on 20th September 2004. ntl has today emailed those customers taking part and will telephone them shortly to arrange collection of the equipment. Until then, the terms and conditions of the trial service remain unchanged.

Commenting on the announcement, Richard Loveday of ntl said:

“I would like to thank those people who took part in the trial for their valued assistance. It was a trial that we all had high hopes for, but unfortunately it proved not to be commercially viable. The project was restricted by our ability to achieve line of sight to homes. This meant we would need a much larger number of transmitter stations than originally estimated. This in turn made it uneconomic.

“We know that today’s announcement will be very disappointing news. I would like to assure you that we have not taken this decision lightly and it has only been taken after serious consideration of all options. I would also like to thank the Milton Keynes Council for their support.”

Milton Keynes Council sent the following emails today to Trail participants:

To all existing trialists (via email) advising of closure of trial:

Dear customer,

IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR NTL WIRELESS BROADBAND TRIAL

We announced on 24 March that a final decision regarding the possibilities of extending our wireless broadband trial in Milton Keynes would be made this summer. Since then thorough analysis and consideration has been given to this trial and its technology.

Unfortunately, the trial showed that while our 90 trial customers were satisfied with the service overall, a full commercial service would be unsustainable. We have therefore decided to end this trial and not launch a full commercial service.

As a result your wireless Internet service will end on 20th September 2004. We will telephone you shortly to arrange collection of the equipment. Until then, the terms and conditions of the trial service remain unchanged.

We know that today’s announcement will be very disappointing news. I would like to assure you that we have not taken this decision lightly and it has only been taken after serious consideration of all options.

Any other ntl services are unaffected by today’s news.

I would like to thank you for your valued assistance in this trial. Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call.

Yours sincerely,

ntl broadband trial team

To all potential trialists who were awaiting connection:

Dear customer,

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: NTL WIRELESS BROADBAND TRIAL

Thank you for expressing an interest in taking part in the trial of our wireless broadband service. ~

We announced on 24 March that a final decision regarding the possibilities of extending our wireless broadband trial in Milton Keynes would be made this summer. Since then thorough analysis and consideration has been given to this trial and its technology.

Unfortunately, the trial showed that while our 90 trial customers were satisfied with the service overall, a full commercial service would be unsustainable. We have therefore decided to end this trial and not launch a full commercial service.

As a result we are unable to provide you with a wireless broadband connection to trial.

Yours sincerely,

ntl broadband trial team

Reactions

Member's reactions after the announcement:

I am bitterly disappointed that NTL have not been able to roll out a commercial service on the completion of the trial as, even with NTLs infrastructure limitations, the Internet access I have had over the past 10 months has been an outstanding success.

The speed increase to 750K last week made matters worse by emphasising how good a download of 90kB/s can be, especially as I know that any ADSL deployment will never approach these speeds in Loughton.

So to recover, I have today opened an account with Andrews and Arnold and will terminate my dormant Demon account, move my web sites from Demon and reconfigure my mail forwarding accounts. I really hope that I am not one of the unlucky few whose long reach ADSL proves to be a failure :(

Sadly NTL's commercial decision will be costing *me* a lot of time and money.

Regards

Bob, Loughton

I too am gutted that NTL are to pull the plug. I’ve loved the fast, reliable service we’ve enjoyed for so many months. I would have been the first in the queue to sign up on a commercial basis. A dreadful shame that it's to end – although all along I’ve found it hard to believe that NTL would be able to make it stack up, and an announcement like BT’s recent one was clearly going to mean the end of the line.

My real concern now is for the handful of members (*hopefully* just a handful, anyway) who will continue to be outside the reach of ADSL despite the new BT planning rules. Even a couple of percent would, on an MK-wide scale, mean thousands of people. So I don't think the campaign is over yet. Perhaps ‘the handful’ will need to regroup and refocus in some way, but disbanding is surely not an option at this stage. The 1200 members of BB4MK grew from just such a handful of people in Monkston of course.

What do others think?

Neil, Shenley Lodge

NTL's trials have demonstrated that it's technically trivial to provide > 5mbps wireless service to those homes in Milton Keynes "too far" from the exchange, but relying on a commercial entity to provide service depends upon that service being profitable for them. The marginal cost of supporting an additional cable or ADSL user is trivial compared to that of supplying an entire new infrastructure (not only in terms of siting aerials or whatever, but also in terms of support, billing & installation) for a "handful" of users in Milton Keynes, who will (presumably) be supported by conventional means eventually, anyway.

The publicity value of a "community project promoting a shared informational & educational resource" cannot be over-estimated, and I think this could well pay-off were it applied to the problem of aerial siting. The ongoing costs of such a network would be minimal, as individuals joining the network could sponsor additional bandwidth on ADSL uplink nodes; the bursty nature of internet access would tend to ensure (as long as the network is not saturated with inconsiderate mickey-takers) that both the uplink node & any wireless clients would get more benefit out of a single 1Mbps or 2Mbps ADSL connection than each would get out of a 512kbps one.

Check out these links for details of other successful community wireless projects:
http://www.guadawireless.net/netstatus/netstatus-map.php
http://www.503.gink.org/consume/503/leeds_consume_full.gif
http://ewlan.g8gon.com/
http://www.wlan.org.uk/operational_wlan_sites.html
http://www.arwain.net/
http://www.seattlewireless.net/
http://www.nodedb.com/unitedstates/wa/seattle

There seem to be plenty of competent enthusiasts involved in BB4MK, so there's probably a really good reason that I'm not aware of that this hasn't been attempted already.

Andy, CMK

BT Trail

The BT Extended reach trial is still open.

How the NTL: trial developed.

NTL wireless trial ends in failure

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