Broadband improvement in a small rural part of Scotland

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thinkbroadband :: Better broadband for one small part of Scotland

Broadband Boost For Glen-Tanar Area | Donside Piper & Herald

My Comments

This story isn’t about a fibre-optic rollout that covers a small town or village with next-generation broadband service. It is, instead about bringing a country area in Scotland up to the current expectations of fast and reliable Internet service.

In the Glen-Tanar area of Scotland, BT Openreach improved the ADSL copper infrastructure using “regeneration” technology to improve the bandwidth available to the residents. This is effectively installing repeaters on the telephone lines so that, rather than getting a very low bandwidth ADSL signal, the rural customer gets at their ADSL modem-router the full 2Mbps signal that an ADSL user in the city would get. No doubt these would be considered “link speeds” with bandwidth reduced due to the overheads required by PPPoA compressing and encoding.  A similar project took place at Ballogie which neighboured this area.

What was know was that the older connection wasn’t just slow, it was unreliable with many of the signal dropouts and modems regularly “retrying” the connections. The new hardware was also about achieving the current 2015 universal service obligation for broadband in the UK.

Of course, other issues like the quality of the copper infrastructure need to be assessed. Here, in these rural areas, there is often ageing connectors due to poor maintenance and the wiring may have started to perform less to expectations. These need to be rectified in order to assure good-quality Internet service.

These kind of broadband-improvement developments that occur in the rural areas, whether through bringing the copper infrastructure “up to scratch” or laying down next-generation optical-fibre or fixed-wireless infrastructure for “next-generation” bandwidth allow people who live or work in these areas to have the expectations of real broadband.

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