On the Today programme this morning there was a feature
about a rural community in Kent that has decided to organise its own high speed
broadband service. The village is now
enjoying speeds of around 100 mps. There was no information about how this had
been funded, and, since they had run fibre cable into all the houses in the
village, I cannot help thinking that it must have been a rather expensive
exercise. The village is 5 miles from
Sevenoaks, a rather prosperous area, and the scheme included some small
business premises, so perhaps this is a clue to affordability.
Meanwhile, back in Suffolk, I have had an update on high speed broadband progress
from our first rate delivery team at SCC.
We had hoped that additional information would be available
around now with regard to the deployment of the second contract, which will
extend coverage to over 95% of households in the county.
The scheme has been designed by BT and agreed by our officers, but is
now with central Government and the European community to ‘sign off’. Unsurprisingly this is taking longer than expected,
but is likely to be completed within weeks.
After that the website will be updated, a newsletter will be issued and
local briefings for communities will be held.
In the meantime a satellite pilot scheme is underway for
those who cannot obtain speeds of 2 mps.
We're still waiting, with baited breath, for your update on broadband for Suffolk, Jenny.
ReplyDeleteAs your point out yourself, it's such a shame that BT was privatised by the Conservatives in 1983.
Had that not been the case, a state-funded national rollout of fibre to the premises (FTTP) would have been well under way by now.
As for "satellite" internet: what a dreadfully poor alternative. What we often talk about is the huge latency involved in satellite comms.
The "latency" is the time taken to get a data packet from a server, perhaps on the otherside of the world, to the PC in your lounge.
Remember, the telecommunication "satellites" are apparently in a geostationary orbit, around 32,000 km above the equator.
If we do the 'math', based on the speed of light, it will take around 500 milliseconds for each leg of the journey. And the way internet protocols usually work is that there's also another delay of the same time, for acknowledging a transmitted packet.
Now, what gets me is the bandwidth of a "satellite". Surely a "satellite transponder" (whatever that is) has a finite bandwidth capacity.
And if every community across Britain (and much of Europe, served by the same satellite "footprint") - starts to rely on "satellites" for broadband internet, then surely it will saturate the transmission capacity of a "transponder" very quickly?
I'm thinking, if only there was some way of bouncing a signal off the sky; perhaps through ionospheric refraction? Obviating the need to launch any more "satellites".
Wouldn't that just be marvellous? It would solve the broadband problems overnight!
What do you think Jenny?