So last week I was at a meeting on St Marys to discuss the emerging details of the ambitious project being fronted by the CDC and BT to provide the majority of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly fibre broadband access to 100mb.
Wait a sec, did I just type that? I did, how about a bit more, a synchronous fibre based link to the internet that is as fast as most people have ethernet access?
This is epic, truly holy grail stuff, it’s important not to understate the importance of this.
Sure, some city centres and larger populated parts of the country already have fibre connections of some type or other, but the truth is BT will provide fibre to the premises (fttp) for anyone who’s willing to pay.
In actual fact I had been looking into leased this year, we’ve been ditching the ADSL lines in the traditional “throw another ADSL at it” type of network configuration, but now our 2mb SDSL is getting a little tired, recent “improvements” to our network has seen an increase in traffic stress the line, as a result the Internet is getting slower.
10mb leased on a 100mb bearer (means we’d be able to “flex” to 100mb should it become a need/affordable) would come in at about 8k p/a, granted this is more expensive than half a dozen ADSL lines and an SDSL (just), but it’s the SLA that ought to prove the clincher.
Then some clever so and so pops up and promises me 100mb fibre at a reasonable cost (have been quoted figures by people from both CDC and BT, but I won’t repeat them, suffice it to say it’s well within budget for most businesses) by 2014
I think I still have my justification for a decent line now, and the fact that unless you’re very lucky (you in Leedstown, Chiverton Cross area, St Agnes, Portreath, St Day, Devoran, Stenalees and Par in 2011) you won’t be able to use the service for a good few years, but forget about all of that.
Just think of the benefits. Most businesses will find it hard to justify a large technical outlay on a sparsely populated office, so the common logic is to, yep, you got it, “throw another ADSL in” and setup a point to point vpn.
Fine, so for the relatively small cost of BT line, ADSL connection and a router you can get an office up and running, but when you start talking about sharing files, accessing remote systems, etc, you run into problems. With a decent link that will not bottleneck in one direction you can manage this service a whole lot better and really make your staff in remote offices feel like they are part of the rest of the company!
So you have your multi-site infrastructure, you have your centrally hosted systems, you can now (or will by 2014) be able to connect to them at something between 20mb and 100mb, ethernet speeds, working in the office in Truro will suddenly feel like the office next door to head office in London.
Hell, depending on the emergence of similar projects Cornwall might, for a change, get the jump on some of the rest of the country – which will no doubt lead me onto a separate post about if an influx of new businesses to Cornwall will feel like the second wave of second home buying, but that’s life, and commerce, and if you want to spend your money setting up a new business in Cornwall that’s fine by me!
I’m hopefully going to keep my foot in the door of this one, with several sites in Cornwall and across the Isles of Scilly, these links will be a godsend to us, and perhaps more importantly allow us to place more confidence in our systems and allow our staff to better support our customers.
http://www.cornwalldevelopmentcompany.co.uk/doing-business-in-cornwall/ict-in-cornwall.html
I suspect that improvements in residential and business broadband may have a limited short-term impact, at least for the first five years. Consumers will maybe subscribe to marginally faster speeds, and will maybe pay a little more for the privilege; hardly a good return on the major county-wide investment.
Cornwall is still the poorest county in the UK, and many homes or small businesses probably cannot afford super-fast broadband in the short term without specific investment. Domestic and business broadband is still “good enough” for most homes and most current commercial applications in the small-to-medium enterprise.
Look around the world, particularly in developing nations. The real game-changer is mobile. Think one device (or more) per person, rather than one connection per residence/business. Then consider the impact of widespread 4G/LTE mobile services: broadband in-your-pocket. Suddenly our crucial tourists, tradesmen, and many other small businesses, many of whom are mobile, which Cornwall has in spades, can conduct business wherever they happen to be, when out and about. This is the real transformation that super-fast broadband brings – something we just can’t do yet – which gives us full parity with a large UK city, and is the real benefit of the massive investment which Digital Cornwall are making on our behalf.
Mobile carriers must commit now to next-generation services, based on the availability of super-fast broadband throughout the region, to enable Cornwall and Scilly to realise the full economic potential of a world-class communications infrastructure, as soon as it becomes available.