You might wonder why we need to support a campaign for faster broadband in the Burton exchange area as we have good speeds here in Burton, don’t we? Well actually only some of us do. The rest are struggling with speeds which range from no better than the old 56kbs dial up modem speed, to around 10 times that speed. If I tell you that some of us average 5,000kbs speed, and that upgrading to fibre to the house could bring speeds of up to 1Gbps, you can start to see why we feel it’s important.
Not just because we’ll get faster internet on our road but because the whole area covered by Burton exchange will get faster internet, and those who will benefit the most are those users who are furthest from the exchange itself – people on the edges of Burton, those at Clawthorpe, Dalton, Holme, Priest Hutton, Tewitfield, and Yealand Redmayne, who all come under the Burton area exchange and who currently suffer those much slower speeds.
Consider what faster access will mean for the community… families will be able to exchange videos taken at celebrations in the blink of an eye, you will be able to chat using webcams with high-resolution images and no distortion or interference at times when more people are using the internet – peak time usage causes problems to VOIP services and lag when watching television online, e.g. via the BBC iPlayer. Those irritating buffering delays will be gone!
Businesses will benefit from being able to use faster networking facilities and off-site backups, cloud computing, filing legal documents such as tax, VAT and company documents, farmers will be able to manage their stock registers with ease, and much more.
Students at schools and colleges will have better access to their intranet services. Online gamers will benefit from faster ping rates, better play speeds and so on.
Broadband Cumbria has an excellent article by Barry Forde on how to achieve this: Link The idea is that communities can take on the task of providing Fibre to the Property themselves via a Community Initiative (or digital village pump) rather than wait for BT to provide a lesser service (Fibre to the Cabinet) which apparently may not even benefit areas like Burton where there are no street cabinets and where properties are connected back directly to the exchange, leaving us simply with an upgraded exchange capable a speed of “up to” 20Mbps and where distance from the exchange still means a sharp fall off in line speeds, unlike FTTP which can handle distances of up to 10km without loss, and where the speed is symmetrical: so the upload and download speeds are the same!
We will need a faster and more robust internet access structure to keep up as more and more facilities and functions are digitised, as more services are offered online, and the existing structure isn’t going to be strong enough to cope with the demand of the coming years.
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