Re: Research Assistant for Rural Networks in Scotland

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[Note:  This comment comes from friend Dave Hughes.  DLH]

From: Dave <dave@oldcolo.com>
Subject: Re: [Dewayne-Net] Research Assistant for Rural Networks in Scotland
Date: July 12, 2014 at 10:49:23 EDT
To: dewayne@warpspeed.com

What is this? deJa vu all over again? Not sure whether the Scots are just behind the times, or Wales was ahead of it. But over 10 years ago, after I had visited my ancestral Wales in 1998 over Christmas (to hear a chorus of drunken Welshmen singing on New Years Eve) I suggested I could hook up every Welsh farmhouse, wirelessly, to the Internet, after British Telecom told Parliament it could not connect up rural England to the net without millions of pounds of government subsidy, (or by 2022 through market forces).

The Welsh National Assembly took me up on it, administered by the Welsh Digital College, and so paid for me and a few family members to fly to Wales and educate and demonstrate how it could be done. Including turning Welsh Pubs into Internet  ISPs. From one end of Wales to the other. Welsh Television even made a movie out of it. In Welsh language, with English subtitles. I have that online http://www.davehugheslegacy.net/mediatypes/videos/efrodoc.mp4

The project was called E -fro – the Welsh term Fro means ‘community’ and with the E in front . Efro – you get the idea.

But of course with the typical bureaucratic sluggishness that afflicts many things UK, and the usual heavy handedness of the telephone company monopoly – BT, which sensed competition from wireless – they only implemented it partially. And it didn’t take any ‘Computer Scientists’ to do it. Just a little American wireless family savy. Some of which I learned from Dewayne Hendricks back in the wireless Dark Ages.

The whole story, with issues such as the difference between US FCC approved EIRP and rules for the EU  and UK, (1 watt) is in 8 part narrative form at <http://www.davehugheslegacy.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=431:trips-to-wales-1&catid=103&Itemid=210>

I am also sending the above  to the Scots who may be interested. At 86, I am not too keen to hike the Scottish Highlands to do it all over again.


Dave Hughes
dave@oldcolo.com
http://davehugheslegacy.net

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