The truths they don't want you to read....
An online report indicates that (some) of our connectivitiy problems may be solved...
The UK's Chancellor has confirmed that the government will sink £150m into buying up cell sites with the intention of extending rural coverage to 99 per cent of the population.
Ofcom will advise the government on how it should go about spending our cash on sites for base stations to be utilised by multiple operators, with the intention of creating greater coverage for existing networks and encouraging operators to roll out next-generation services to the edges of the UK.
Details are still scant, with more to come from the Department of Fun (properly Culture, Media and Sport) at some future point, but the basic idea is to buy up sites during 2012 and make them commonly available by early 2013. Operators will be able to move in cheaply, to provide service to the six million or so people who currently aren't getting blanket coverage today, hopefully with 3G or 4G services, but at least 2G.
I just hope it is true, and reaches here.
The top-secret final submission from the high-tech high-speed node-sniffers at Bayhead, is shown below, and no doubt influenced the Chancellor greatly.
 |
| "You can only get a signal if you stand to the left of the wooden sheep" |
A source close to the Parliamentary Office advises that the 'mapping' (sic) of
mobile reception along the spinal route by the office staff is worse than useless.
The source suggests that the locations are at best approximate, and do not take into account all the service providers available.
"It is", quoth the source, "Like using a child's drawing of a cow to make the case for increased subsidy."
 |
| The chief telecoms advisor |
As the map has been made with public money, why haven't the media asked to see the detail of this exercise in pointless futility, especially when excellent (and more accurate) maps
already exist.
Perhaps the first questions should be: who was (allegedly) actually in this vehicle when 4 networks were being inaccurately mapped simultaneously?
Cynics might think that this refers to going back to using our fingers, as the promises from the politicians seem not to have materialised.
A brief recap....
The SNP promised a fund of £50m for the Scottish Futures Trust to give everyone broadband access. That promise has now gone, as far as I can tell.
The
Government recently offered £70m which required match funding from the Scottish Government, but this was derided as "not enough" by the Scottish Government.
Now, according to the Scottish Government it will cost £300m to wire the Highlands and Islands alone, money which they have neither promised nor hinted that they might find.
Is it any wonder that potential residents here are
so confused and disillusioned about the Broadband offering (outside Stornoway) that they have to resort to public appeals for the information which the main publicly funded provider won't release.
I'm sure that there are many who can help him out with much more technical knowledge than I will ever have.
Update: The Scottish Secretary has a go too.
The only advertising that our business does is via Google Adwords; having abandoned print advertising almost entirely.
I've just spent today reducing our exposure and the range of advertising that we do, as we need a bit of a breather to catch up with all the work that has been generated.
We estimate that every £1 spent on the internet - domains, Adwords etc - is generating about £350 in new turnover, which is a good result by any reckoning, but we actually need to throttle growth for a few months so that we can properly control and assess how we manage that growth.
It's a good complaint, but we need a bit of a life over the summer and to catch up with everything else that is going on.
I was tempted to write "If you work in the Comhairle and can't read this, then please let me know", but sanity prevailed.
A Council employee reports that they can't access the blog through their Comhairle issue computer.
It sounds like the whitelist has not been updated for the individual or their overall permissions are incorrectly set, but I just want to check that I'm not inadvertently being blacklisted......
Isles MSP Alasdair Allan has today written to Connected Communities to raise the capacity issues which are now occurring on the BT link from Stornoway to London, which provides the internet connection for customers of Connected Communities.
Didn't our MSP promise that the SNP would solve all the Broadband issues?
Shouldn't he be writing to the Minister? Surely his mate can have more influence to fix the problem.
We might have to move to captchas for all those who wish to comment, as spam is exceeding genuine comments by 4:1.
Captchas - those annoying boxes requiring you to type in Cf6Y7 to proceed - should stop the spam comments being generated automatically, after which we should be able to return to normality.
Sorry, but filtering the crap is a job for Scottish Water, not us.
One Councillor was complaining that he couldn't open the links in the documents.
Now I know why.
In the interests of public accountability, openness and to demonstrate the use of modern technology, there are no actual hyperlinks in the Budget pdf files.
I discovered this when trying to read something that has been pointed out to me. I had hoped that I was doing something stupid, but when I converted and opened the pdf to repost the links.....the text is styled like a hyperlink. Obviously to confuse us.
Can anyone in the Council, please, give us the actual links so that the public can see what the Councillors are being told and are deciding upon?
...to whoever found my laptop, exactly where I left it in the back of the luggage trolley at the airport, and handed it in to the security staff.
Would you like superfast Broadband? From BT?
One of our friends works very close to the top of BT and has told us about "
Race to Infinity", which allows you to vote for the areas to be upgraded.
I don't yet know how it will be assessed and rolled out, but I have no doubt the readers will keep us informed about the process. The top 5 exchanges will win the race....
Vote early. Vote often. From every PC you can access.
Update: Voting page reads "Stornoway, Western Isles has a current score of 0.05%" which implies something about percentage involvement rather than absolute votes.
Further update: It looks like only Stornoway is eligible, having more than 1,000 premises. Sorry, but how about some Hebridean solidarity, and then we promise to work to get it rolled out throughout the rest of the islands.
Many thanks to a regular correspondent for pointing out the
Leader European Funding site, which is encouraging communities to get funding to upgrade their exchanges for Broadband.
You've got 6 weeks to make your case, before the group decide who the lucky winners are....
As with all these types of bidding applications for limited funds, the broader the range of community support you can establish and document, and the wider the level of take-up, and the deeper the involvement of the community then the more chance you have of success.
And write it all up in a nice readable document.
This gives communities a chance to move forward rather than bitch about Connected Communities and what might have been.
I'd be very interested to hear back from anyone who gets involved in a bid.
h/t to well, you know who you are....
The islands are now scanned and digitised.
Find your home,
your business or just spy on your neighbours, all from the comfort of your PC.
The diaspora can now see all the changes to town, without the need to come here!
There is a prize for the first person to find an embarrassing picture on the islands, such as
this one from Finland (just about SFW). Follow the links at the bottom of the story for other examples (NSFW)
Thanks :-)
32 people have followed my twitter, but I've not done a single twit yet.
(h/t to anon)
We had a systems upgrade in the office, involving a new and improved phone system and minor changes to our wiring configurations. The later for all sorts of reasons that I don't understand.
We were told that this would mean that we had two broadband lines overlapping for some time, before the old one was ceased. Our previous experience when we moved offices and transferred lines, had BT ceasing broadband at our new offices, and installing a new service over the still active old line at the old location; and we were very keen not to have the resulting two-week loss of broadband repeated.
Pledges written in blood were sought from the 'Account Manager', and in due course, we duly had no broadband for most of yesterday, and then discovered that we were being given another new line to replace the existing two lines; with different login credentials that we hadn't received.
It was very late when I got home, but thanks to the Technical Helpdesk we got the email back up and running very late last night.
Today, we are promised that the swap-over of the phone systems will leave us with a line for only a few minutes. I'm not holding my breath.
Thankfully the local staff are excellent, with one of them deciding to move forward the programming of the new phone system from the scheduled next Friday to today, on the reasonable grounds that the new system won't work when they switch it over today without being programmed.
(Updated 3/2/10 to improve the grammar slightly)
I have been given details of a new broadband provider for the Western Isles; a story that is due to be announced in detail in the next month.
Luathnet are planning to provide a full service via the normal telephone lines and by satellite - but not through the Connected Communities network - as part of the Local Loop Unbundling.
Full details of the plans (and the prices) will be announced in February, but it looks like we are getting another local challenge to the service provision. Hopefully they can cover most of the islands from day 1; or at least the majority of residents.
I'm hopeful that this will provide the competition that is desperately needed to drive forward the internet community and intent usage in the islands, and I for one will be studying the offer very carefully to see how it could benefit my business and my domestic provision.
More to follow.
Wouldn't it be great to have fibre optic cabling running through the islands so we could all get really high speed broadband and all other associated services.
We already have it.
That is 'we' in the sense of 'not us'.
According to
the Gazette, Transportation Committee last week were told that:
BT have a fibre optic cable located in the verge of the existing causeway and wish the Comhairle to duct this cable through the area of new works.
There are (were?) similar cables running to Stornoway Airport and hence on to Faslane which were put in place perhaps 10-15 years ago.
Of course, they are all military based, but instead of running civilian and public services along side, they don't officially exist.
Instead of thinking that broadband in the Western Isles could be revolutionised by piggybacking on the moving of the existing, once top secret, cables and delivering lightening speeds across Uist, we have the unedifying spectacle of a bitching session about the cost of moving a public asset so that the public can't get near it.
I am sure there are many people out there with more knowledge, but I am told that the network runs to Rangehead in the South and
Clettraval in the North, and between Stornoway Airport and to at least one other 'civilian' location near Stornoway.
Further information is very welcome....
Congratulations to my brother who has just seen
a patent of his published for approval.
I might be being just a bit thick, but does anyone understand just what "Secure Boot with Optional Components Method" actually means?
Kenneth, whatever you are doing is highly impressive but totally unintelligible to us mere mortals.
...and other gratuitous stereotypes, doesn't take away from the technological success of Finland. Nor the (hugely ambitious) depth of their broadband ambitions for the public.
As in
all of the public.
Kudos to the Finnish government, which has just introduced laws
guaranteeing broadband access to every person living in Finland (5.5 million people, give or take). This is reportedly a first worldwide.
Starting July 2010, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection as an intermediate step, says the Ministry of Transport and Communications. By the end of 2015, the legal right will be extended to an impressive 100 Mb broadband connection for everyone.
Read that and weep.
Finland is the country that is home to Nokia and who have sought to find practical uses for every element of IT in an effort to benefit the entire population
We are the country where broadband is dependent upon tidal conditions.
Anyone know when the next flight to Helsinki is?
