‘dig for victory’ attitude got villagers connected
A “DIG for victory” village on the outskirts of Cardiff who laid their own broadband cable has seen record superfast traffic during lockdown – and doubled the houses in the remote countryside now living online.
Villagers living in Michaelston y Fedw, population 300, were so fed up with their terrible internet connection that laid their own superfast cable.
Pensioners, farmers, teachers and the pub landlord hired diggers and heavy gear to lay 15 miles of cable to reach their homes.
The villagers in the South Wales countryside decided to act for themselves after getting fed up of being unable to download films, stream music or connect to online banking.
And now their hard work has paid off with 250 homes spending lockdown with superfast broadband speed to watch films, connect with family and every other online treat.
David Schofield, a director of the Michaelston y Fedw Internet Community Interest Company, said: “We’ve now got 250 connections and spread out about 6km (four miles) out of the village – that’s quite a lot of digging.
“We connected a lot more properties than originally anticipated, roughly double thought we would.
“We could spread it further and turn it into a commercial business but we would be forgetting that it started as a community project – we all do other things and no one wants to make it their day job.
“Over the past four weeks we have seen record traffic – everyone is now working from home.
“We’ve had no problems with the connection and in fact we’ve got lots of extra capacity anyway.
“Despite the lockdown the village is still coming together. As a network we have a couple of Zoom paid for accounts where we’ve had virtual quizzes with over 30 people taking part.”
Many people living in the village near St Mellons and Castleton, close to the eastern edge of Cardiff, were involved in the project which has been so successful they have worked as advisers to other countryside villages and won European prizes.
It has also doubled in its original connections – with nearly all houses in the village and beyond now connected to the DIY network.
David said that since word got out of the Michaelston project he and other organisers have been inundated to help out in other areas.
He said: “We have advised a number the amount we
Residents of Michaelston y Fedw celebrating the first day of digging to install fibre broadband cables in 2018. Their efforts mean life under the coronavirus lockdown has been more manageable, with locals finding it easier to shop online and contact friends and relatives of other projects and continue to do so.
“We feel very fortunate to have been able to build our own network and in these times where internet access is even more important it has proved to be a great success.”
Villagers put in thousands of hours of volunteering to dig more than 20 miles of trenches to install their own cables and the service went live in 2018.
And the people of Michaelston now have one of the fastest internet speeds available at a thousand times quicker than before.
The idea was sparked in the local pub when moaning villagers were complaining about heir wi-fi connections.
Ben Longman, landlord of the Cefn Mably Arms, said: “We were in the pub and we were all moaning about how bad the wi-fi was.
“I had just paid for high speed broadband and realised it would not work.
One of the organisers, Carina Dunk, 63, even went to Brussels to collect an innovation award handed out by the European Commission.
She said: “This has brought everyone together.
“The beauty of it us more people know each other now whereas before everyone was quite insular – they would go to work and go home and they kept themselves to themselves – there’s now much more a sense of community.”
Carina said the broadband in the village had been especially helpful during lockdown.
She said: “We have a couple of community WhatsApp groups – one for a neighbourhood watch and another called ‘beat the bug’ for people to arrange picking up prescriptions or shopping or things like that.
“It has enabled people to do Zoom messaging, Zoom quizzes, and video messaging loved ones or download films – these things wouldn’t have been available under our old BT internet.”
Her husband, retired marine worker Jim Dunk, 73, put in hundreds of hours of voluntary work installing fibre – along with neighbours he hadn’t known before the broadband project.
Jim installed the broadband hub with his neighbour Brinley Richards, 81. The pair hadn’t met before but are now close friends.
The project cost about £250,000 with villagers stumping up £150,000 of their own money to secure their superfast connection speed.
They were also able to obtain £100,000 from EU funding and the Welsh Government Access Broadband Cymru scheme.