A typical example of the ups and downs of setting this service up: we've known for a month or more that it's going to cost us a lot of money to meet the requirement to keep the records of customer activity which the law - and the police - require us to keep.
At one stage it looked like costing £2,000 for the software alone, plus heaven knows how much for bits of hardware, and we began to get very fed up with the statutory requirement for customer-session logging. Our friends at Herefordshire Council - also dismayed - bravely agreed to help out if we had to face a mighty bill, but there was a risk that the cost would simply sink us, and we'd have to give up. It would have been Lingen Community Broadband RIP, thanks to yet more red tape.
As the weeks passed other technical solutions began to appear - and they involved using freeware (rather than costly software) and some slightly cleverer routers (the boxes, flatish and about the size of a telephone directory, that control who gets to use what bit of our bandwidth and at what speeds). Yesterday it emerged that the preferred technical solutions was a Cisco 1841 router - but, horror, they cost around £1000 (see http://www.hardware.com/store/Cisco/CISCO1841?campaignid=1-22590961&gclid=CLmq8p6mwqACFUKZ2AodQ2HUew ).
Once again worry sets in: where can we find £1000? Do we really need it? (answer: if we're not to break the law, yes we do). Today a solution arrives, almost literally a case of deus ex machina: QiComm have found a second-hand router elsewhere in their network and plan to let us have it, for free. It's had two years of wear and tear, but who are we to argue? It will last us until we can sort out something more fancy, and we're very grateful to QiComm (again). So a happy ending - we hope - to yet another little mini-broadband drama.
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