News / Remote areas lag behind superfast Lerwick
LERWICK will be the first island community in Scotland to get superfast broadband as part of the government’s £146 million project to connect the highlands and islands.
Speaking at a digital forum meeting in Lerwick on Friday morning, BT Scotland’s director Brendan Dick said the town could expect broadband speeds up to 80 Mbps as of September this year.
The meeting, organised by isles MP Alistair Carmichael, also heard that customers in most other Shetland communities could expect superfast broadband in 2015 and 2016, a year or so earlier than anticipated.
However Friday’s meeting in North Staney Hill hall spent more time focussing on small communities that are unlikely ever to be connected, such as the outer isles and Unst.
BT said the roll out was the UK’s most challenging and difficult broadband project.
They said they were confident of eventually reaching more than the initial target of 76 per cent of Shetland households.
Ian Brown, of Shetland Broadband, said most people were not too concerned about superfast download speeds – even fast broadband would bring a massive improvement.
West Burrafirth crofter Norman Leask said Shetland’s west mainland was once again left behind.
Fetlar development worker Robert Thomson said communities needed to act and work together to get broadband to the areas BT are not interested in, such as the north isles.
Brendan Dick said due to technical advances and lessons learned during the rollout he was convinced that more households than initially earmarked would benefit from the programme.
Citing an example from Cornwall he said BT was tasked to reach 84 per cent of households and had managed 95 per cent at the end.
“We want to keep pushing the boundaries, because we do ultimately see this goal of having everybody in the UK and in Shetland on services that are fit for the 21st century,” he said.
Alistair Carmichael said the meeting clearly demonstrated that further work needed to be done.
He said Community Broadband Scotland was able to help with funding for community projects such as the North Isles Broadband initiative, but his suspicion was that even then not everybody would be connected.
“Meetings like these allow us to identify where the gaps will still remain after all the existing projects are completed and then making sure that we find ways of getting these gaps filled too,” he said.
“That might be a case of more money, it might be a case for technological advances to come along, it might be a combination of the two.
“So good news for consumers in Lerwick today, but it is a timely reminder of the scale of what we still have got to do.”
Superfast broadband is defined as speeds of more than 24Mbps. Most customers in rural areas are unlikely ever to enjoy this, due to the length of copper lines between the fibre optic cabinets and people’s houses.
The next digital forum meeting is planned to be held in rural Shetland, perhaps in Yell or Unst.
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