Tag: Cornwall

Scilly Isles to have reliable fast Internet thanks to a fibre backhaul

Article

thinkbroadband :: Scilly Isles to benefit from fibre link and better broadband

From the horse’s mouth

Superfast Cornwall

Press Release

My Comments

Scilly Isles in Cornwall, United Kingdom is now to benefit from reliable real broadband thanks to a fibre-optic backhaul.

Previous, the inhabitants were serviced by a wireless link between Land’s End and the islands as their Internet backhaul. But reliability could be an issue due to the nature of radio links and this backhaul would not yield enough bandwidth for all the residents and businesses on those islands.

Here, the Superfast Cornwall initiative which facilitated this link made use of undersea “dark fibre” (unused fibre-optic links) that went out to the Atlantic Ocean to steer the Internet link to these islands. They intend to have the service up and running by 2014. 

Like a lot of these broadband-improvement efforts, this one is a public-private partnership with the European Regional Development Initiative and Cornwall Council putting their hands to the plough.

I also see this as opening up better pathos for people at the southern tip of England to benefit from the real fast broadband, whether you work or retire there. It could also allow for some form of financial regeneration to occur in these areas.

Next-generation broadband hits the country in the UK again, this time in Cornwall

News articles

thinkbroadband :: Faster broadband comes to Hatt and Higher Pill thanks to Vtesse

From the horse’s mouth

Vtesse Broadband

My comments

Vtesse Broadband have done it again by providing two small communities in Cornwall with next-generation broadband.  The two communities, Hatt and Higher Pill, have been provided with a level of Internet service that would be considered woeful by today’s standards but this could be rectified by the use of fibre-to-the-cabinet technology with a VDSL2 copper sub-loop link to the customer’s door.

One reservation I have always had about any DSL-based copper end-link used in a broadband setup in the country is that the telephone lines between the exchange and the customer would also have been playing a contributory role towards poor-quality service. This could be due to ageing copper infrastructure or wiring setups that aren’t particularly efficient especially if there are clusters of buildings.

What I was mainly pleased about is that a small private company had worked with a small community to provide that community with a real broadband Internet service, especially a next-generation service, rather than waiting for the major telcos to provide the service.

The same article had raised the issue of the UK government reneging on subsidising the fibre backhaul to these services and I would concur with this concept because if a government needs to put its resources where its mouth is when it comes to providing rural communities with decent-standard reliable broadband.

These small broadband setups that cover rural towns in the UK are something that needs to be watched by all of the major parties contesting the Australian Federal Election and by the party who wins the election and holds government because they can be an example of how rural communities have “gotten off their backside” to provide city-grade broadband Internet.