Tale Of Two Broadband Villages

Cumbria is a microcosm of counties across the UK, many of which still have some “notspot” areas – defined as places that have no or below two megabits per second broadband. Lindsey Annison has been campaigning for faster online connections for her rural community in Cumbria for over 20 years. She is one of an [...]

Fight On For Better Broadband

While some have welcomed the government’s pledge to provide a minimum broadband speed of 2Mbps to every home in the UK by 2012 others think it will be an extremely challenging task, and insufficient to meet future needs. The government has defended itself saying that the 2Mbps speed is just a baseline and will form [...]

Light My Fibre

As the UK moves towards super-fast broadband the divide between the broadband haves and have-nots is likely to get wider. The government estimates that some 30% of the country will not be covered by BT and Virgin Media’s super-fast broadband plans – offering speeds of up to 100Mbps (megabits per second). It could see a [...]

Taynuilt Primary Counts in 600

Taynuilt Primary School in Argyll and Bute became the 600th connected site in the Pathfinder North broadband rollout. The school was connected with a 8Mb broadband connection on Thursday 28th May. The rollout elsewhere is as follows: Argyll and Bute: 118 sites connected (81.3%) Highland Council: 298 sites connected (66.3%) Moray Council: 89 sites connected [...]

In A Broadband Not-Spot?

There are still users in Britain who can’t get a fixed broadband connection because of where they live as their premises are too far from the telephone exchange, or in a few cases, their exchange doesn’t support broadband yet. No matter what the cause, this part of the population has to resort to expensive solutions [...]

Satellite Gets Funding Boost

The European Space Agency has awarded Avanti Communications €250,000 (£220,000) in funding for the design of a super-fast satellite broadband system called Hercules. The proposed satellite could deliver between 2Mb and 50Mb broadband access to 2.5 million UK rural households that are currently without access to broadband internet services, David Williams, chief executive of Avanti, [...]

C&W Upbeat

Telecoms firm Cable & Wireless (C&W) saw full-year profits fall by 13% after it took a hit on the costs of a revamp and integrating a recent acquisition. It saw pre-tax profit of £233m in the year to the end of March, as it absorbed £189m of exceptional losses. Stripping out those one-off losses, earnings [...]

Boost For Future Broadband Speeds

The UK government is spending £1m to develop technologies to boost future broadband speeds. The money is being spent on research that could boost browsing speeds to between 1 and 10 gigabits per second. The technologies being researched are all to do with broadband delivered by fibre-optic cables. Some of the 13 projects being funded [...]

School Opens with Pathfinder

The staff and pupils of Acharacle Primary School, Lochaber, moved into their state of the art timber school on Thursday 7 May 2009, which promises to be the most energy efficient in Scotland. Scotland’s first wholly sustainable school is home to 48 English and Gaelic Medium primary school pupils and 14 English and Gaelic Medium [...]

About the Technology

The geography of the Highlands and Islands requires an innovative approach to the provision of broadband services, using a range of technologies including fibre, radio and BT connections to ensure that all schools and authority sites have equal access to the services and benefits that broadband can bring.