Why  Fast Broadband

More and more of the services we use in our everyday lives are based on the internet and increasingly these services require faster and faster broadband connections. BBC iPlayer, YouTube and Skype are all common examples of video based services - and every year more of the content on these and other  services is in High Definition - which in turn requires still faster speeds. Many of us in the Upper Dale already struggle to use these services because of low broadband speeds. In the coming years this will become a very serious problem. As urban areas progressively move to superfast broadband, so the service providers will provide more and more content which requires fast broadband - and rural areas risk being left behind as they were at the end of the dial-up era. New televisions are increasingly internet enabled and  good quality broadband speeds are needed to take advantage of these capabilities For those of us that work from home, web conferencing has been well established for some time using services such as WebEx, while the use of HD video conferencing is rapidly expanding, as we all seek to reduce our carbon footprints. Those of us with children at school or  university are only too familiar with the increasingly critical role that the internet plays in education. There is a roll out of Fast Broadband going on in North Yorkshire with a large pot of money (some £30 million) which is being given to enable a large company (e.g.: BT or Fujitsu) to enable most of the county with fast broadband. This however will leave between 6% - 15% of North Yorkshire without Fast Broadband. There is a much smaller pot of money allocated to cover the remaining places that will not be covered by the large contract. We are, according to NYCC, in this 6% – 15% that will never get a solution based on the copper network from the exchange, thus we require an alternative solution.