Many turning to DIY broadband schemes

A recent report has suggested that many people are turning to DIY broadband schemes because they are fed up of waiting for larger firms to roll out faster broadband networks.

According to a recent report released by the Communications Consumer Panel many people are now turning to DIY broadband schemes because they don’t want to wait around for the bigger firms to do something about getting faster broadband networks in place. Officials from the panel have said that there are around forty such schemes that have sprung up around the UK.

The schemes that have been identified by the panel range from one in Yorkshire aimed at connecting over half a million homes to super fast networks to one in Hampshire aimed at connecting just thirty or so homes to these faster networks. A number of the schemes that are being put into place are being done with the cooperation of the local authority.

One industry official that was involved with putting the report together said that he was surprised to discover just how many of these DIY broadband schemes were being looked into or were in place, and he stated: “There were a lot more than I realised, which reflects a certain amount of frustration that people are not seeing super-fast broadband rolled out as fast as they would like.”

The report also shows that one village is getting together to lay their own fibre network, and in a number of other areas local residents are looking into whether it would be viable to lay fibre networks in the local community. The scheme in Yorkshire aims to start connecting the first lot of the 550,000 homes it is targeting in the second part of this year, and it has backing from the local authority and Regional Development Agencies, as well as funding from the European Commission.