Rural Northumberland gets wireless mesh broadband

Northumberland County Council has invested £1.5m in a wireless mesh distributed to 18 local towns and villages that will save the council "hundreds of thousands of pounds" in the provisioning of broadband to the area.

The mesh replaces a leased BT line that was considerably more expensive over the long term.

The project has taken three years to roll out and the mesh has been made available to 14,000 users who work for the council, in local businesses, schools or libraries.

"The network is a combination of fast fibre backhaul, with a point of presence in each of the 18 towns and villages, and wireless mesh technology that sits on the top," said Frank Freeman, the project manager at Northumberland County Council.

"We use Cisco routers and switches in each of the exchanges, and then run fibre from those exchanges to the council buildings and other strategic areas," he added.

"At each of these points we put a gateway, which then provides fully resilient access to broadband. If one of the gateways goes down, it will be taken up by another, which means we are unlikely to suffer any downtime."

The gateways were provided by SkyPilot Networks, and Northumberland worked with KBR on the implementation.

The gateways also provide Wi-Fi connectivity to street level, which can be accessed by users within a 7km radius.

"The main point of this project was to get connectivity to the county council staff so that they can become a mobile workforce. They can use the Wi-Fi in their homes to work remotely. We have hugely reduced travelling costs," said Freeman.

"These efficiencies, combined with the savings we have made on the operating costs of the network, will end up saving the council hundreds of thousands of pounds," he added.

Northumberland had previously been providing access to broadband using BT leased lines.

The council has also used the technology to provide Allendale, an extremely remote town in Northumberland, with access to broadband for council employees, and it is looking to gain extra funding to roll out similar rural projects.

"There are plans to expand this network to areas where broadband is not available, but it would require funding from Broadband Delivery UK [the body armed with allocating money for national broadband rollout] securing this is ongoing progress," said Freeman.