Fibre to cabinet broadband

[grinner]

Is anyone having slow speeds at night  with their broadband mine is down to 4.75meg after 6 pm ?

[rgibson]

Yes mine is terrible. Was pulling 2 Mb and upload @ 8Mb. Can barely stream anything. Before I was getting at least 20Mb download. Have phoned BT but they are useless. 

[Equality Street]

Move to Fair Isle. Soon enough they'll have super fast broadband! Only costing £250,000! That's an expenditure of £4500+ plus per man, woman and child on the island. Probably cheaper to give each person a subscription to a personal satellite service for decades, and provide the kit, but that's by the by...

[Frances144]

I may give up soon and go back to pigeons.

[RileyBKing]

If we could get 4.75 mb/s at ANY time we would be over the moon.

 

BT Superfast Broadband? hahaha......

 

Apparently the exchange is enabled but actually providing the service to our location is officially "challenging" which I take to be code for "it ain't happening mate"

[brian.smith]

Move to Fair Isle. Soon enough they'll have super fast broadband! Only costing £250,000! That's an expenditure of £4500+ plus per man, woman and child on the island. Probably cheaper to give each person a subscription to a personal satellite service for decades, and provide the kit, but that's by the by...

Well we pay the same in Fair Isle as everyone else for the service yet receive a fraction of the speed we have chosen our scheme so it lasts with little ongoing maintenance  costs yes it was expensive but those per person costs mean a lot more than broadband speed we already have a new applicant family which also helps to preserve our school nurse ferry etc etc

Edited March 2, 2016 by brian.smith

[Equality Street]

 

Move to Fair Isle. Soon enough they'll have super fast broadband! Only costing £250,000! That's an expenditure of £4500+ plus per man, woman and child on the island. Probably cheaper to give each person a subscription to a personal satellite service for decades, and provide the kit, but that's by the by...

Well we pay the same in Fair Isle as everyone else for the service yet receive a fraction of the speed we have chosen our scheme so it lasts with little ongoing maintenance  costs yes it was expensive but those per person costs mean a lot more than broadband speed we already have a new applicant family which also helps to preserve our school nurse ferry etc etc

 

Fair enough - but £250,000 seems a bit extravagant, especially in these austere times. If folk are put off moving to Fair Isle because of YouTube buffering then you have to wonder what they expect from remote island life in general... 

[Colin]

"Fair enough - but £250,000 seems a bit extravagant, especially in these austere times. If folk are put off moving to Fair Isle because of YouTube buffering then you have to wonder what they expect from remote island life in general..."

 

All the comforts of inner city life perhaps?

 

Overly cynical about this but, maybe they just expect to form an orderly queue for as many "hand-outs" as they can get...

[brian.smith]

well you either no or you dont we are mainly a crofting community we run our own services and most will know you cant support a family on a croft alone. Most secondary incomes now realy on some form of remote working so connections such as these are essential. Maybe Colin you think we should just abandon the Isle. This is nothing to do with forming orderly queue's for grants it is trying to get a diminishing population back on its feet. We did our homework and carried out much research and three main points were Identified. Broadband better and faster, Transport more reliable, and housing better and more widely available we have achieved the first and last with grant funding for only one.

 

Horns shows your knowledge of how the internet serves commerce when the best you can come up with is you tube!!!

Edited March 3, 2016 by brian.smith

[Colin]

I just find it strange that so many think that "faster" and "better" broadband is the cure to so many problems.

 

If you run any kind of business then, by all means, set up a web site..  This, incidentally, does NOT require "faster" or "better" broadband and, any visitors to your site will be subject to their own particular internet connections idiosyncrasies, not yours...

 

If the site is successful then it will begin to generate revenue BUT, this information will almost certainly be transmitted to you via email and, that also does NOT require faster broadband.

 

There are scenarios where a reliable, high speed connection would be advantageous but, as Horns suggested, the main beneficiaries would appear to be "browsing addicts".

 

Anyway, good luck with it.  I will watch with interest and, I would be surprised indeed if it made any real difference to "life on Fair Isle"

[Roachmill]

^Not every job or business that relies on the internet is a web site and, even those that are, still require a good amount of bandwidth to maintain and update in this day and age. Besides, a relatively high speed connection will have other uses than purely business (and YouTube  ) that simply haven't been possible over the current connections.

 

Or perhaps everyone on Fair Isle should just carry on knitting sat by the fire like the good old days... and they could use their dial-up modems for goalposts when the weather comes fine   Plus, the money is coming from an allotted grant scheme specifically for just this kind of thing isn't it? From the sounds of things, Brian and the rest involved have gotten of their arses and gone out and secured all this which should be applauded. I can all too easily imagine the grumbling were the money to go somewhere further south!

[hjasga]

I just find it strange that so many think that "faster" and "better" broadband is the cure to so many problems.

 

If you run any kind of business then, by all means, set up a web site..  This, incidentally, does NOT require "faster" or "better" broadband and, any visitors to your site will be subject to their own particular internet connections idiosyncrasies, not yours...

 

If the site is successful then it will begin to generate revenue BUT, this information will almost certainly be transmitted to you via email and, that also does NOT require faster broadband.

 

There are scenarios where a reliable, high speed connection would be advantageous but, as Horns suggested, the main beneficiaries would appear to be "browsing addicts".

 

Anyway, good luck with it.  I will watch with interest and, I would be surprised indeed if it made any real difference to "life on Fair Isle"

 

Sorry but this is a very ignorant post. The difference between average and 'superfast' broadband has little bearing on general web browsing - chances are you wouldn't notice the fractions of a second faster that a Shetlink page would load after upgrading. Where it does have a big effect is on wider internet services: file transfers, video conferencing, collegiate working on shared documents in real time. These can also massively improve productivity in the modern workplace and would allow enterprise that simply isn't possible in Shetland at the moment. 

[Colin]

Sorry but this is a very ignorant post. The difference between average and 'superfast' broadband has little bearing on general web browsing - chances are you wouldn't notice the fractions of a second faster that a Shetlink page would load after upgrading. Where it does have a big effect is on wider internet services: file transfers, video conferencing, collegiate working on shared documents in real time. These can also massively improve productivity in the modern workplace and would allow enterprise that simply isn't possible in Shetland at the moment. 

 

 

Ignorant? Moi? 

 

Seeing as I work in IT I would think that, perhaps, I know(?) a little bit more than most and, you don't need to waste the "sales pitch" on me...

 

Anyone who uses the internet should realise that there are several "bottlenecks" ranging from contention issues that cause huge performance drops to the undeniable fact that your "target" is only ever going to be as fast as the slowest link in the chain..

 

OK, a £250K investment should help relieve part of that but, I still wonder just who the main beneficiaries will be..

 

Also, your statement that "and would allow enterprise that simply isn't possible in Shetland at the moment." is wrong..

Businesses in and around the great metropolis of Lerwick can already access 80Mb Fibre which is more than adequete for "wider internet services".

[hjasga]

I said it was an ignorant post, not that you yourself are necessarily ignorant. Knowledge of IT certainly didn't shine through in denouncing faster broadband based on the idea companies would only benefit through customers accessing their websites. I'm not sure the point of your paragraph about bottlenecks - you'll always be as slow as the slowest part of the chain, so... what? Don't upgrade services in Shetland, often the slowest part of the chain? 

 

It's great that Lerwick, Scalloway and much of the south Mainland now have access to FTC broadband, in some cases even FTTP broadband. Much of rural Shetland struggles to get even reliable ADSL though and that is a cause of significant economic and social disadvantage. Affording better connectivity would afford business opportunities that are not currently available - whether somebody working remotely from Unst or even a digital storage centre as was proposed for Lerwick recently (let's face it, the land required for that would be far more readily available elsewhere if the connections could match). 

Edited March 4, 2016 by hjasga

[brian.smith]

^Not every job or business that relies on the internet is a web site and, even those that are, still require a good amount of bandwidth to maintain and update in this day and age. Besides, a relatively high speed connection will have other uses than purely business (and YouTube  ) that simply haven't been possible over the current connections.

 

Or perhaps everyone on Fair Isle should just carry on knitting sat by the fire like the good old days... and they could use their dial-up modems for goalposts when the weather comes fine   Plus, the money is coming from an allotted grant scheme specifically for just this kind of thing isn't it? From the sounds of things, Brian and the rest involved have gotten of their arses and gone out and secured all this which should be applauded. I can all too easily imagine the grumbling were the money to go somewhere further south!

This sums it up. We dint come on here and moaned about our broadband we did something about it. Two and a half years of meeting after meeting traveling at my own expense juggling figures speaking to customers assessing need costing re costing business plans company formations and Colin for your information this was all done without receiving one penny of public funding. Even opening the bank account cost two of our residents £50 each.

I have an IT background and still support old customers down south this will open up remote working to Fair Isle improving employment we have potentially attracted a family who are self supported through remote network management so life goes beyond a website and you tube when you talk of broadband speeds.