Service announcement 13th February 2010

LINGEN COMMUNITY BROADBAND
We've done our sums - we've taken advice - and, above all, we've listened to you - and we're now able to confirm that, from 1st April, Lingen Community Broadband will be in operation.
The idea is that - with as small a gap as possible - we'll pick up the broadband service which is being closed by QiComm on 31st March. A Community Interest Company is being formed to run the service and we hope all users will all become members (equivalent of shareholders). In many ways a community interest company is like a charity.
We've been lucky to receive enormous practical and financial help from Herefordshire council. Without their money we could not pay our start-up costs and we simply couldn't think of taking this on.
But this business has to pay - it is not going to be subsidised - and it can only work if we all want it to. In practical terms, that means we all have to be committed to 18 months contracts, and all pay our bills. This project is simply not viable without that kind of committment.
A small group of us have got us as far as to today's decision - but to go any further will take effort from everyone. This project is expensive, very difficult and virtually unique. Most important of all, this is a shared project and it will fail dismally if any of us acts as if this were a service provided by "them" not us. Lingen Community Broadband will be yours, and everybody needs to feel, and act, and think like they own it.
This is a good place to say how overwhelmed we were by the response after Monday's meeting: it has given us the confidence to go ahead. Nothing else could have done that.
I should repeat once again that the prospect of BT offering a better service any time soon remains, so far as we can see, very small. Those who'd like to leave our network - we hope none, but who knows? - run the risk of being left with no broadband service at all.
In the next week or so we'll be sending out a note on the services available and the prices - they will be much the same as they are now, perhaps better, certainly no worse. We'll be inviting users to sign up and agree to make payments by monthly standing order. We'll be making a special effort to speak to people who couldn't make it to Monday's meeting because we know you'll have questions and concerns.
In the meantime there are useful steps you can take:
* Encourage your neighbours to sign up as new users. The more users we have the greater the chance we'll remain financially viable. Tell them to contact me or pass me their details. We've already arranged that an engineer will check 15 new customers to ascertain if they have line-of-sight to our transmitters. These site surveys are free to LCB and potential users if we do them before 1st April.
* Using existing transmitters we may be able to offer a service to users in places like Birtley, Byton and Combe/Coombes Moor, and the area north of Shobdon and between Shobdon and Pembridge - if you know people who might be interested, sell them the idea of broadband! Again, ask them to get in touch or pass their details on to me.
* Keep in touch! We all have to stick together in the next few difficult weeks as we set this up.
For now the board of directors comprises me, Brian Lewis (village hall treasurer and now our financial director), Steve Sanders, Trevor Joseph and Judith Phillips (our company secretary). Please feel free to contact me or any of us if you've concerns, questions, suggestions, offers - anything.