Article
thinkbroadband :: Rutland Telecom to deploy fibre to Hambleton village
From the horse’s mouth
Internet service for Hambleton – Rutland Telecom
My comments
Rutland Telecom is at it again with another UK village being wired up with next-generation broadband. Here, Hambleton which is near Oakham in Rutland, is being equipped with fibre-to-the-premises broadband.
They are achieving this goal in a similar community-driven model to the VDSL-based fibre-to-the-cabinet setup in Lyddington, Leicestershire which I have touched on in this site.
One thing that impressed me about this is that it is technically “ahead of its time”. Here, the setup uses an “active” point-to-point fibre arrangement rather than the commonly-deployed “passive optical network” arrangement. This is equivalent to moving a wired Ethernet network froam a hub wihch shared the bandwidth between the devices to a switch which gives each device its own bandwidth at the best speed. Here, the setup is future proof and capable of high speeds and increased bandwidth and can satisfactorily cope with the situation when the village becomes a town.
There had been 60% takeup on the offer to register for the next-generation broadband which shows real interest in better-standard Internet in the country. The service is intended to go live on (North-Hemisphere) Spring 2011.
This company is now encouraging other small UK communities to gain their help in setting up next-generation broadband. It could then be a step in the right direction for telecom co-operatives and similar companies to look towards raising the bar for a standard of Internet service normally taken for granted in urban areas.
