🏰 An Englishman's home is his castle. 🏰

It's a phrase I haven't really thought about before today but I was thinking about the experience I had when I bought my current home (castle?) back in 2010. To me, at least, that doesn't feel like a long time ago but a LOT has changed since then.

Background

I have been a home worker (that was what we were called in 2010... now a remote worker) since 2002 so broadband connectivity has always been an essential utility for me. When I left my suburban house and moved to the country I had no idea my world was about to fall apart... 😫

Right after moving day, I ordered a broadband connection from BT having seen that the previous owners had a BT home router. I was wholly reliant on this because there is no mobile service on any network where I live. When the DSL connection was brought live (which took 10 days... outrageous in itself) I discovered it was running at 198kbps and suffered from frequent drop-outs.

I had just made the biggest purchase of my life and simultaneously made it impossible to do my job. ☹️

Lifesavers

Thank heavens for the team at VILLAGE NETWORKS LIMITED who were running a FWA service covering my village and were able to offer me a connection at 2Mbps. With that (and a small uplift on the backhaul above 512kbps) I was also able to run a femtocell which gave me mobile service at my home office desk. 🐌

After some investigation, I was able to find out that the copper cable from the exchange didn't run directly to the cabinet in the village, it took a circuitous route via a couple of other villages so was well over 3.5 miles which was the cause of the appalling DSL service. Eventually Openreach ran a fibre to my village cabinet (which lifted me up to 67Mbps but also exposed how poor the copper was from my house to the cabinet!). Wifi calling arrived on mobile phones around the same time so the femtocell was also consigned to history. 🚂

The Green-Eyed Monster

I used to look with envy at the stories of projects like B4RN - Broadband for the Rural North Ltd who, by 2015 were running FTTP so, when I also learned about the UK government BDUK funding (now known as the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme) I tried to rally my village to support a local provider to build out FTTP but there was insufficient interest to make a business case and a belief from many that "Openreach will add us soon so we won't be tied to a single provider".

Openreach's own forecast was "by 2025" and that date has now been and gone. Thank heavens for Gigaclear who arrived, dug trenches, laid fibres and delivered 900Mbps to my house in 2024. 🚀

Takeaway

Fast, reliable internet connectivity at home is a given for many people in the UK but, trust me, you really notice when it's unavailable. To demonstrate this, Rightmove have added available broadband speed as part of their property listings now, here's the report for a house in my street:

Footnote:

Incidentally, the history behind the "home = castle" saying is a lot more interesting than most English adage (which are inevitably 'it's something Shakespeare wrote') - take a look on Phrases.org