The Welsh village faster that’s got broadband than Nasa!
. . . no thanks to BT (obviously). Locals dug eight miles of trenches and installed it themselves
Within a few months, £150,000 had been raised — enough for the committee to apply successfully for another £100,000 from government grant schemes — and farmers offered free access to their fields for the cables to be laid.
Residents began investing in MyFi — Michaelston’s own internet company. It will cost just £30 a month to use the broadband, and there’s no connection fee. Investors expect to see their cash returned in full after three years and all subsequent income will be used to improve the village. It’s not surprising that David is now the most popular man in Michaelston. But the engineering genius behind this is Carina Dunk, 61, a mother-of-two who has lived in the village for more than a decade. The retired human resources manager, whose job took her around Europe and the Middle East, has shown such deftness with fistfuls of fibre optic cables — each no thicker than a hair — that her nickname is the ‘Splice Queen’. As her neighbours put in hundreds of hours of work excavating ditches — eight miles’ worth so far — and supervising diggers as they installed fibre optic cables through fields, under rivers and even via a corner of the graveyard, Carina oversaw the connections to more than 100 internet routers.
This week, I find her in a noisy, hot shipping container near the village hall that serves as the HQ of the network, crouching down to loop a filament around a plastic grip as she proceeds to connect another home.
‘It isn’t really difficult,’ she insists. ‘And don’t call it electronics — these fibres transmit light, not electricity.’
The real wizardry is done with compressed air. After the trenches are dug, with backhoes and burrowing drills that can dive under obstacles and emerge 50ft away with pinpoint accuracy, plastic tunnels — looking rather like drainpipes — are laid as conduits for the hollow fibre optic cables.
The more robust of these cables, about half an inch in diameter, run under the fields, roads and everything else from the NGD data centre to that shipping container. From there, cables a quarter of an inch thick radiate out to homes and businesses.
In both cases, the technique for threading the fibre optic cable is the same. Compressed air is piped into the plastic duct to form a frictionless cushion, and the cable is fed along at one mile an hour.
The project would have been much harder without the active cooperation of neighbouring landowners and free access — a favour that certainly would not have been extended to the likes of BT. As Carina points out, many local farmers are keen to find new uses for their ancestral land. If wheat won’t pay, why not farm data?
The only proviso in most cases was that digging couldn’t commence while traditional crops were growing, which is why Project Megafast Michaelston won’t be finished till after the Harvest Festival.
Soon, memories of a time when it could take five days to download a film and ten minutes to send an email will be long gone.
And Michaelston’s remarkable ingenuity has come with a bonus: everyone knows everyone now and a wonderful camaraderie has taken hold.
State-of-the-art broadband has got Michaelston connected. And not just in the way they were expecting.