The Herald Scotland reports on a Scottish survey that finds that “Home broadband was far and away the most popular innovation of the last decade, named by half of all respondents as having the biggest impact on their lives since the turn of the millennium.” I moved to Skye in August 2006 and have lived in three different houses with different solutions to the problem of achieving home broadband.
The first was a wee cottage, too far from my landlords house and wireless access, luckily the landlord was a technical wizz and implemented broadband down the electricity line, so that I could plug in my Airport and make my own wireless network.
Next place, even more remote but with a telephone, so I used dial-up until the exchange was upgraded, being just at the maximum distance from the exchange I managed a very slow broadband connection, but at least my phone line didn’t get tied up. As I left satellite broadband was on offer.
Now, I live about 200m from the exchange and have 8Mb broadband.
Some of the other options on Skye include building a wireless ring around the Internet connection at the local college (BBC). European funding for broadband is available for communities via the Leader programme.(Scottish Government)
In 2001 I was the author of a contracted consultancy report on the future of broadband provision in the Western Isles of Scotland. I recommended straight-forward replacement of the ageing copper network with fibre as being the only long term solution. I did however point towards an interim solution that was a possibility and related to broadband wireless. It is this latter solution that was implemented and shortly after it was rolled-out there were bandwidth demand issues and reliability problems.
ReplyDeleteIt has been great as a quick fix for many who could not previously access broadband....but as demand for bandwidth increases is it really the scalable solution that fibre is??....In rural parts of the US instead of up-grading old copper telephone networks they have simply replaced it with fibre (as prices have fallen) and provided rural areas with 21st century services at the same time and often before their urban counterparts.