My Automated Home: Nigel Giddings – Installing Broadband in a Rural Location

In this months ‘My Automated Home’ feature, Nigel Giddings shows us his ingenious set-up that grabs a 3G signal from one corner of his rural idyll, beams it 300 meters back to his home and redistributes it to the family.  If you’re in the countryside and conventional ADSL or cable broadband is not available, then there’s still hope.  Read on for all the photos and details.

Submission by: Nigel Giddings – For ten years now domestic customers have had fast access to the internet via ‘Broadband’ delivered by ADSL. I’m sure the vast majority of people reading this will have a domestic ADSL connection with speeds exceeding 1 Mbs on the download, some may even have ‘Broadband’ delivered by other methods with some people lucky enough to have fibre running at 50Mbs! I would suggest it is impossible for people with this type of connectivity to imagine what it would be like to be sent back to the dark ages (the late 90’s) when speeds were measured in Kilobits rather than Megabits…

My family and I recently decided to have a change of lifestyle, having lived all our lives within 20 miles of London we decided to ‘emigrate’ to Cornwall. We decided to move to a rural part of the county, no town or village life for us. Since April we have been living on Bodmin Moor, many of you will have heard of Bodmin Moor and the Beast that is supposed to live here, in fact we are a few miles from the hamlet of Bolventor which is the location of Jamaica Inn made famous by Dauphine du Maurier in her book of the same name.

The downside of such a great location is that technology has passed it by. We do have mains electricity and water, although some of our neighbours don’t even have that… We do have telephone service although the cable length is twice that which can support ADSL, I have also been told that even dial-up struggles due to attenuation on the line.

A view from the ‘back garden’

Off course I checked all this out before we moved, but it didn’t stop us. With enough effort most things can be overcome and the location was too good to pass by. Options for Broadband included Satellite or ADSL delivered to another location and extended by point to point WiFi. Mobile (wireless) Broadband wasn’t an option because the only coverage locally was provided by Vodafone and only as GPRS (2.5G).

 Using 2.5G Data – Having moved house in April 2010 and because much of my time was being taken up with work in the Middle East I had made no progress with a broadband solution and the family were reduced to using 2.5G through USB  dongles and GSM handsets  which was much less than adequate. E-mail would dribble in and browsing was very hit and miss, not ideal when your trying to start a new business. However, even at these low data rates (circa 50Kbs) the family were typically using between 4 and  5GBs of data a month.

A quick solution would have been to install a satellite link. However, at £1,000 install and a monthly fee of £30 plus it was not a cheap option. This may have been the solution but even at £30 a month you are capped at 3GB download which would not meet our needs based on our current usage when restricted to 2.5G. Previously when we had ‘Broadband’ via ADSL we would consume 40 ~ 50GB a month.

A glimmer of hope – A recent visit by a friend reopened the discussion on what solution to use. My friend and his wife use a number of mobile devices with different mobile networks, in particular his wife uses a ‘3’ SIM for data. My friend, who was more optimistic about mobile coverage in Cornwall than me suggested we take a walk around to see what was available. I was somewhat surprised to see that we had 3G coverage at the edge of our site on a piece of high ground. Especially when having reviewed the serving sites on the OFCOM website sometime earlier it indicated all the local sites used by the various operators were 2G only!

 

Coverage plot showing coverage of the ‘3’ network locally. The red star shows where we were able to get a signal. I have to congratulate ‘3’ on their prediction s/w. The Blue star shows were I live

A bit of further testing showed that it was possible to receive a 3.5G signal (HSDPA) with a theoretical maximum download of 7.2Mbs. Happy Days!

What to do now? – So having established that ‘mobile broadband’ was available in the area there was now the issue of how to connect it back to the house. Although the signal was still on our site it was 300 metres from the house. The limit for Ethernet over CAT5(e) is 100 metres. I did run into this limit once before at my previous house but was able to install a simple 100M switch midway to act as a repeater, I was lucky as I had a garden shed with power to house the switch half way along the route. This was installed as a temporary solution (it lasted a couple of years and I cut the cable twice accidently during that time while cutting the grass!). The link did suffer from a couple of lightning strikes in that time and any ‘permanent’ solution would need protection, either lightning arrestors or even an upgrade to fibre. This time it was 300 metres with no power options along the route and while I don’t cut the grass, the sheep do that, trying to protect a delicate cable over that distance through rough ground with roaming ruminants would be difficult.

With the advent of ‘Mobile Broadband’ a few interesting devices have also been developed. One is the MiFi, a 3G Modem back to back with a WAP (WiFi Wireless Access Point) but these are meant for personal use with self contained batteries and low power outputs. Another option is a 3G gateway, the Huawei B970 has a 3G transceiver with modem compatible with HSDPA (3.5G theoretical maximum download of 7.2Mbps), a 4 port 10/100 Ethernet switch, and built in WiFi. You can also connect an analogue telephone line and it is powered by a USB lead.

A Huawei B970 sitting on the car seat while parked at the top of the hill plugged into the cigarette lighter with a USB lead showing Power, WLAN, Signal and connection (Blue=3G) LEDs

The obvious thing to do was to use a 3G gateway at the hilltop and then have a point to point WiFi link back to the house. Power would initially be supplied by a leisure battery through a USB converter until a more suitable 230V supply could be provided. (That is another story…)

The Huawei B970 is not designed for external use so needs to be protected from the weather. Because the speed archived on the 3G connection is dependant on signal strength it also made sense to mount the Gateway as high as possible in what was a marginal signal area. It was therefore decided to mount the unit at the top of a 20ft pole.

 
The Gateway located in a box on top of the 20ft pole on the ‘Hilltop’ looking towards
the house 300M in the distance. A power lead is taped to the pole and connected
to an 85AH Leisure Battery on the ground


A view inside the box with a cigarette lighter 12VDC – USB 5V converter

Bridging the 300 metre divide – With the Gateway 20ft in the air, on a hilltop, in a weather proof box (plastic) and pointing roughly towards the house, with almost clear line of site, there was not enough WiFi signal to reach the house some 300 metres away. The free space loss for 2.4GHz over 300 metres is approx 90dB.

The system levels can be assumed to be:

  • Gateway Output power 20dBm
  • Free space loss -90dB
  • RESULT       -70dBm
  • Rx Sensitivity -80dBm

A view of the 300M WiFi path, the trees in the right half of the
picture interfere with the LoS (Line of Sight) slightly

By adding all these figures together we get a theoretical ‘margin’ of 10dB in our favour, that is to say the receiver gets -70dBm when it only requires -80dBm. However in the real world the link did not work without an additional high gain antenna. This is probably because the WiFi output of the Gateway would be nearer 14 or 16 dBm, the losses caused by encasing the gateway in a plastic box (no external antenna) take off another 2 or 3dB and the effect of some trees in the line of sight…. As you see things quickly work against you.

Unfortunately the Gateway does not have provision for an external WiFi antenna (although you can connect an external 3G antenna). So the only way to get more gain into the system was to install a directional WiFi antenna at the house.

There are many and various suppliers of WiFi high gain antennas and I was cautious about some of the quoted gain figures. Having researched the losses and obtained some idea of output powers, receiver sensitivity, path loss, rain fade, fiddle factor, I guesstimated that I needed something like 10dB or more additional gain. dB (decibels) is a logarithmic scale and 10dB gain actually means a multiplication of 10 times. To put it another way, if you put 100mW into the antenna an antenna with 10dB gain will radiate 100mW x 10 = 1,000mW (1 Watt). Note the UK power limit is 100mW (20dBm) and refers to radiated power out of the antenna including any antenna system gain.

I selected a seller from e-bay offering a flat panel antenna with a quoted gain of16dBi for £25 inc P&P, that’s potentially 4W EIRP (effective isotropic radiated power) for 100mW input…  or to put it another way a gain of 40 times. Even if the antenna is 16dBi you will have additional losses due to connectors and cable (as much as 2 ~3 dB). The supplied cable was 500mm which is good, you see some antennas for sale with cables of several metres and any gain in the antenna could be lost in low quality coax. You are better off keeping the antenna tails as short as possible even if this means installing the transceiver outside. I have no way of accurately measuring the gains and losses in the system so it is impossible to confirm any of these figures.

The WiFi Client and flat panel antenna mounted in a weather proof box on the house balcony

A closer view of the WiFi client showing the flat panel antenna more clearly


The WAP being used previously before it was installed as the WiFi Client in the waterproof box.
The Antenna in the picture can be removed and the external antenna connected
to the RP-SMA (Reverse SMA) connector

The WAP used at the house can be configured as client mode and is configured the same way you would configure WiFi in a laptop. The link which operates in the 2.4 GHz band has been set to a channel so as not to interfere with the house WiFi signal. Although there are 11 channels in the 2.4GHz band they overlap and so it is recommended to use channels 1, 5 and 11 to prevent co-channel interference. We are ‘lucky’ here in that there is no other WiFi in the area so we manage our own frequency reuse plan, in a built up area it is more of a free for all. It is possible to use 5GHz instead, which is a much quieter band, but equipment for this is not as readily available so I am going for the KISS principle.

Configuring the system – This is relatively easy, if you have configured WiFi in your own house this follows the same principles. There are a couple of things to consider as this is a point to point link and not the normal point to multi-point as used in a typical WiFi install.

Security. This is always an issue. A minimum security requirement is to use some form of encryption, most devices support WPA with a PSK (Pre Shared Key). Many devices allow MAC filtering; this restricts which devices can connect to only devices that have been listed in the filter, in this case the equipment at the other end of the link can establish a connection. SSID Broadcasting, this can be turned off so that your equipment does not broadcast its presence and therefore other equipment does not attempt to connect and it does not show up if people scan (War Drive) while in the area of coverage.

Antenna Gain. It is better not to over egg the power in the system. What you see as a strong stable signal is interference for others and could create an escalation of power output in the area serving to raise the ‘noise floor’ working against everyone. Another disadvantage of high power is that the number of people in range of your system increases and could raise the threat of a security breach.

IP Settings. As you can see from the diagram below the link uses the private 192.168.x.x ip range and is different from the main LAN IP range (which for me is just an extension of the WAN). My LAN is protected by an ISA server Firewall. Placing a hardware router here would replace the ADSL Modem/Router in an ADSL network and would provide similar protection. The 3G router can provide DHCP but this is normally off as devices have static addresses and all IP traffic should originate on the LAN and be routed via the firewall. It does mean, however, if you configure a WiFi device with the 3G gateway settings (and you configure the MAC filtering) that a direct connection can be made to the 3G gateway for testing and temporary internet connections.

 CLICK PIC FOR FULL SIZE VERSON – Overview of IP settings

The results – The link has been in service for just over a week now. The improvement in Internet access is enormous. Using 2.5G (Narrowband) meant that we experienced many timeouts while waiting for pages to load (Facebook was almost always unusable) and downloading updates / applications and even keeping the antivirus database up to date was a problem.

We now have access to services like YouTube, BBC iPlayer and other streaming type services, something that just didn’t work before. I am still watching how much data we consume as the Mobile Broadband package we have is limited to 15GB a month and we are now averaging 400MB a day which will increase significantly if we use these multimedia type services.

As you can see from the Speedtest.net results we are getting a healthy upload and download speeds although the latency figures are much higher than you would expect to get from an equivalent ‘Wired’ service. These results have varied through the days of the week but as the connection is new I haven’t identified the patterns as yet.

 
Speedtest.net test carried out on a Sunday afternoon

The connection is not without its problems and I have had to remotely reset the 3G gateway three times in 2 days. Either side of this period the link was solid and the problems appear to be related to the 3G network side of things although I cannot prove this. (Latest news, 34 hours up with no issues)

The Hilltop installation uses a 12V 85AH leisure battery fed through a Car Cigarette lighter – USB adaptor which provides the 5VDC that runs the unit. Measurements of the current draw were taken to try to calculate the life of a battery on Full charge.

 
Measurement of the Current drawn by the 3G Gateway (216.7mA)

Using 250mW for easier maths and assuming a battery voltage of 12.5V this translates to just over 3W (3.125W). Using this value we can assume that at the 5V USB converter we are drawing  625mA (3.125/5), by overstating the current we also allow for inefficiency in the voltage converter. This is important as the USB convertors come in various sizes, those that are not rated appear to be 400mA typically which is not enough in this case! I know this because the first one I used caused erratic behaviour of the gateway. It would do a factory reset if the unit was put under load (connected to 3G signal). The regulator installed now is rated at 2000mA and the unit no longer resets.

Assuming 250mA (allowing for variations as the battery voltage drops over time) that would give 340 hours (0.25A x 85AH) but again I am sure this will not be reached. There are 168 hours in a week so it would seem prudent / reasonable to swap the battery with a fully charged replacement once a week.

The next steps – From an ongoing maintenance point of view the first thing is to provide a mains 230 VAC supply. The battery may still remain in case of power failures but depends on being able to source a suitable charger that doesn’t slowly cook the battery.
Although the 3G signal seems good at the Gateway the Gateway web interface occasionally reports a drop in throughput to 384Kbps (from 7.2Mbps D/L) on the 3G interface. This is probably due to being on the edge of HSDPA range although the gateway does not report signal strength so this is difficult to correlate. I am considering installing a directional 3G antenna to increase signal strength of the 3G signal and reduce potential interference from other 3G sites on the same channels which may be interfering with the signal (The gateway is located on a high spot).

Now that we have the ability to use much more than the Data Allowance we have been given (15GB per month for £15.99) I will be looking at how I can increase the Data Allowance, I would be happy to do this in increments of £15.99 per 15GB but that is not possible with a single SIM at this time.

I do have a two-section lattice tower which I intend to install with the 20ft pole on top, this should give me 60ft AGL (above Ground Level) and will enable me to look at how I can get a faster service delivered nearby (BT infinity?) and bring that back to the site.
Over the next year I will be providing WiFi over the entire 50 acre site to work in with our plans to provide intranet access that enables paying visitors to interact with the animal exhibits we are currently planning to build, watch this space….

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26 Comments on "My Automated Home: Nigel Giddings – Installing Broadband in a Rural Location"

  1. Rather than swapping batteries, how about using solar PV to charge the battery. And include some basic monitoring to give an indication if the battery is getting lower.

  2. Awesome article. I live in a small village and just scrape 1Mbps ADSl connection. I have a Three MiFi and if positioned high up inside the house it gets up to 3Mbps although this is unreliable. I may look at doing something similar to you although on a much smaller scale. This article has inspired me. Great work!

  3. Very interesting read, looking at linitx’s mikrotik range to do something similar at a remote site here.

  4. Keith Doxey | January 17, 2011 at 9:50 am |

    Loss of throughput is probably down to the number of people using 3G.

    I have had a “3” dongle since Nov 2007 and during the day the speeds are fantastic but in the evenings the speeds plummet presumably due to the number of people who have “free” laptops from the phone shops for signing up to a 3 year contract etc.

    I know its not a signal strength problem as the indicators still show a strong signal but the available bandwidth is being contended by too many people.

  5. An impressive project and thanks for sharing the details as an inspiration and guide for others.

  6. Stuart,

    I would go for the Solar PV/Battery route if I was not able to get the 230V laid on for little or no cost. The Solar solution would be about £350 and the battery would need replacing every two years or so… I’m have calculated an annual cost of less than £7 for a meter using a ‘no standing charge’ tariff of about 17p / KWh

    Chris O,

    It is defiantly worth a try. I think our wireless broadband performance is good because of the number of users we share with, your mileage may vary… But at £16/15GB I think this is a viable alternative.

    Chris B,

    The microtik equipment is very good. I managed to coble this together with what was lying around, a borrowed Gateway and a cheap antenna from Fleabay. The MicroTik equipment offers many more bells and whistles, SNMP would be a useful addition allowing me to review performance over time.

    Best regards

    Nigel

  7. Keith

    As you say the throughput can be due to contention and the number of people using that particular cell. 3G also has a phenomena called ‘Cell Breathing’ which is caused when many customers connect and the effective range of the various modulation techniques reduces as load increases. What I am seeing is the modulation technique changing meaning that the theoretical maximum of 7.2Mbps (HSDPA) is reduced to a theoretical maximum of 384Kbps (non-HSDPA UMTS)… Improving the signal path with a higher gain antenna may (or may not) counter this… Worth a try though.

    Nigel

  8. Wow I’m impressed, your getting a faster connection than me. I’m using copper in South Manchester. Infinity was supposed to be rolled out jan 1st but I havent seen any benefits yet!

  9. v.interesting / v.useful, too – great posting …

    re: occasional resets – we find our 3 mobile broadband (*) works well & can go for weeks even months without a problem … then, of a sudden, it’ll spontaneously disconnect, or simply go unresponsive, and need reconnecting … if the former, clicking connect is all that’s needed, if the latter a password is also required, and sometimes several attempts … handling this automatically would be nice, but seems unlikely! Now & then, too, the unresponsiveness can have something to do with other apps – EyeTV, prime candidate – and restarting that instead can get things going again, without reconnection …

    (*) USB stick into one of the laptops, others sharing it via WiFi, home or away … typically up to around 4Mbps, seemingly usually server-limited, except sometimes around tea-time …

  10. Nigel,

    Why £350 for the solar option? A cheapo dash mounted solar charger will put out just over 2W. At £35 each, get two of them and hook them up inside a clear protective casing 🙂

    Kyle

  11. Kyle,

    The issue would be, IMHO, that we need 3W 24/7/365. We only get 9 or 10 hours of sunlight this time of the year, then their is the effect of heavy clouds / rain / mist / fog and snow… Not sure how much to allow for but I it would seem I would begin to need an array of at least 5 or maybe 6 to provide the 72Wh per day introducing all the issues of control meaning you would need a regulator with Low and High Voltage disconnects, then some sort of framework to support everything pointing in the right direction.

    £350 would be for an out of the box solution, and I have seen some farm yard / horse box solutions that may be cheaper but it would be a hsame to go the PV route and still have to charge the battery from time to time…

    Nigel

  12. Excellent write up and very interesting.

    If you are looking for a battery charger I’d recommend the CTEK range. These are intelligent and will maintain a leisure battery over many months. For your situation they are also useful as they are weathersealed too.

  13. Nick Austin | January 18, 2011 at 8:45 am |

    Nigel,

    At the end you mention wanting a charger that doesn’t slowly cook the battery. My cheap way to do that would be to use a timeswitch to only charge for a few minutes each day.

  14. Hi, great article, thankyou for sharing it with us 🙂

    It may be worth having a look at the current required by the equipment on the 5V side of the 12>5V regulator, my experience with these regulators is they are very inefficient (I’ve tried running some LED voltage/current displays for my solar van roof setup through a few 5v regulators and found the regs to dissipate half the power as heat). I’ve heard PWM conversion is becoming popular, its something i’m researching at the moment for my setup so haven’t got a solution I can mention right now…Shame this type of equipment needs V regulation as they draw quite a wide range of currents depending on what they are doing.

    Also for providing remote power i’d go with a small wind generator (home made?) plus maybe a small solar panel for sunny still days. You have a mast already so its begging for it..
    With this setup you could run NiMh (or even a Li-ion laptop battery) instead of a lead-acid, and run everything at a closer voltage to 5V to avoid conversion losses. Li-ion battery management IC’s are readily available nowadays, or can be made from butchering redundant equipment. At least you’ll get your 1000-2000 cycles instead of the 300-500 from lead acid’s-although cost may make them equal options.
    Otherwise, if you only run your lead acid down to 50% each time, it’ll last twice as long so having a little more power input will save you money on replacement batteries in the long run…Keeping the voltage below 13.8V will also add to the batteries life a great deal.
    Seems like an ideal application for used car batteries too – they deliver 40-50% capacity for years after the “end” of their life when used in trickle applications like this 🙂
    I need a similar setup to yours for my camper van (providing wifi at festivals) but am limited to using a “Mifi” doodah purely due to power consumption of domestic routers/access points..I’m not doing it commercially so won’t expand my solar/battery bank for this project 🙂 I therefore need to solve the 12>5V conversion efficiency problem quite soon..
    Thankyou again for sharing your project 🙂
    Rob

  15. Great write-up, love the ingenuity of the solution.

    If you get mains to the sitem then I’d also recommend the C-Tek range of chargers, for about £38 you get one that is built to maintain a charge in a battery forever, sensing when it needs another pulse of charge. Aston Martin put their badge on them and sell them as a battery conditioner to keep the battery charged properly for users that don’t drive the car very often.

    However, getting 230v to the site is likely to be very, very expensive if you do it properly. Running it across the surface using arctic cable will be cheaper, but you don’t want one of those lambs taking a bite and getting roasted before you’ve got the mint sauce ready, so I’d look for local generation, solar or wind depending on circumstances.

  16. Very interesting read! This is a very good documentation.

    I just wanted to point out some wired options for people who do prefer wired solutions.

    There is MOBOTIX Mx2wire (http://www.mobotix.com/eng_GB/content/view/full/41154) that can run up to 500 meters over cat7 cable (30 Mbps). It also supports PoE.

    You could also use a COAX cable up to 500 meters but you have to run sepparate cable for the power and you are limited to 10 Mbps.

    Some new Ethernet over powerline modules do support length of 300 meters. This means that only the power cable is required but you must use high voltages.

    You could also use the VDSL2 modems.

    One additional note: you have to bury the cable. So this is additional work (300 meters is not a short distance).

    Also 300 meters of cable does cost already something.

  17. One more note about this setup. Maybe it is possible to build and install a cheap homemade wireless relay so reseting the 3g gateway does not require walking there and back.

  18. Studio Monitor | January 19, 2011 at 6:04 am |

    This is my first visit to your blog. We are starting a new initiative in the same category of this blog. Your blog gave us important information to act. You did a great job.

  19. Remember you can’t run SLA batteries down that far without quickly degrading them? I think you need “deep cycle” batteries to even get down to around the 50% discharge level without quickly damaging them, and even with those I believe they prefer only around 30% discharge…

    I believe the simplest technique for running cables is to find the local farmer with a plough and slip him whatever is required to run a furrow down the required route..? Potentially a LOT cheaper than it costs me to run 300m in the city…

    Good luck

  20. Rob, Michael,

    Powering this long term is definately the next challange. I have looked into all the various PV and wind solutions but there is little that compares with a 230V supply. I have been working with the local regional electricity comapany on a solution. Luckily (very luckily) there is a 230V cable running with a few metres of the installation which they have agreed to tap into and provide me with a limited (500W) service. The cable is already 550M long and supplies the local VF site so they are reluctant to provide a full 60A supply! Because this cable, and a HV cable and a few poles, are on my land they have agreed to install the supply in lieu of 25 years rental for my land which, based on current rates, seems a fair deal… Hopefully I will have power in 6 – 8 weeks. I have already found a supplier who will install a meter for free and I have calculated it will cost about £6 a year based on there current no standing charge tariff…

    Seems to good to be true, lets see if I can pull it off!

  21. patrick-o-matic | January 21, 2011 at 9:28 am |

    Hi Nigel,

    I am also in Cornwall, and also depend on Three for broadband, using a similar setup to the one you have. It rocks! Worth mentioning that Three business tariffs are better value than the consumer ones, and that business users get preferential quality of service vs. consumers. In case anyone is wondering, Three told me that their broadband and voice networks are independent – and the coverage maps support this. Three bb coverage has improved dramatically over the last year, and I can now get coverage in the most far flung places I would never have expected to (e.g. Norfolk coast). Sorry, I sound like a Three shill 🙂

    I’m in a sunnier spot than you, am self-sufficient, powering the 3G router from a 110AH leisure battery and 75W worth of solar panels, via a 25 quid charge controller I got off ebay – but my router (from Solwise) draws 400mA and has external aerials for both wifi and 3G, but only drops the connection once a month (overnight, on three’s billing date).

    PS. Have been surprised by how 3G signal is affected by weather – performance in summer significantly better than in winter. Fog also bad for signal!

    Cheers

    Patrick

  22. Patrick,

    Good to hear your experience with ‘three’ in Cornwall. I looked at the business tariff but the best I could see was a 24 month contract / 15GB at £13.82 (ex VAT?)which is a knatts whisker off £15.99 inc VAT that I am paying on a consumer rate.

    I’m still suffering intermittent drops which I am still trying to understand.

  23. Hi Nigel, great to see someone has written up what many others have done to cure the same problem.

    You mention cell breathing and the reduction of data speed earlier. I think it important to note that as the 3G site can only cope with a certain amount of data a time, it can also reduce it’s power to make its coverage area smaller, therefore supporting less customers in order to maintain speed. Another base station in the same area that is not so busy could then increase its power to mop up the people on the outskirts of the first.

    There are many reasons you may be needing to reset your modem, but one of those reasons may be that there is only one site covering your area as you are on the edge of the coverage boundary. If it shrinks its coverage size due to the amount of users for a short period, you would effectively be knocked off the system for a while until the cell increases in size again. Sometimes the modems need a bit of a kick to reconnect after this has happened.

  24. I recognise your house for some reason? Was it on Kevin McClouds TV Programme ‘Grand Designs’?

  25. Danny,

    It is a ‘Kit House’ so it probably exists in several places. We didn’t build it, it was built by the previous owners about 4 years ago… If we had built it there would be CAT5e, as it is there is nothing which is why all the CAT5e is running on the outside at the moment….

  26. Interesting get around. Might also be worth looking at the new BBC satellite that has just been launched to help cover rural areas. They think it will be about £15-00 a month with a £300-00 set up. Will be interesting to see what you get for this.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11846237

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