High-Speed Broadband Hits Isle Of Wight Thanks To C4L

More residents and businesses on the Isle of Wight will be connected up to faster broadband line speeds thanks to infrastructure solutions provider C4L.

The Isle of Wight is located off the south coast of England, just below Southampton and Portsmouth. C4L is teaming up with Natural Enterprise, a not-for-profit organisation, to provide high-speed internet to rural areas on the Isle of Wight as part of the Yarmouth Broadband project.

Faster Broadband

The major population areas on the Isle of Wight (i.e. the towns etc) are already served by BT’s fixed-line broadband connections. But some rural areas on the island are not connected to a fixed-line service or suffer from poor line speeds, and this is the target area for the initiative.

“My family has been very keen to sign up,” Maria Stafford, a local resident told the Natural Enterprise project. “We live on the outer edge of the telephone exchange and our current service is very slow. A two to three times increase in our internet speed will make a huge difference for all the family, especially as with this service we shouldn’t see a dip in speeds at peak times.”

Dorset-based C4L has a data centre and fibre connections in Bournemouth on the English mainland. It has installed a 100Mbps wireless connection between that location, and the Yarmouth Exchange located on the western tip of the Isle of Wight. From April, this will allow the Yarmouth Broadband project to bring high-speed connections to 1,200 commercial and residential premises in the area.

“Beginning with the town of Yarmouth, C4L is providing Natural Enterprise with a 100MBps wireless connection between the Yarmouth Exchange and C4L’s own connection to the UK network in Bournemouth,” said the company.

This means that Natural Enterprise will be able to offer 1,200 households and businesses in the Yarmouth area broadband speeds more than tripled from the current average of less than 2Mbps.

Internet Have Nots

“Rural high-speed broadband is essential if we’re to stop Britain from becoming a society of online haves and have-nots,” said Graham Biss, MD at Natural Enterprise. “Since traditional service providers are limited to providing connectivity in urban areas that their networks can easily reach, the rest of the island’s population of 140,000 must find other means to get online.”

“Whether through the actions of local councils or initiatives such as the Rural Communities Broadband Fund, we have to find ways to provide the connections that will stop these people being left behind,” said Biss. “In this respect, C4L is providing an essential lifeline for us in helping to make the whole of the Isle of Wight a viable spot to live or do business online.”

Natural Enterprise’s goal is to use the Yarmouth Broadband project as a proving ground before pushing high-speed broadband to those of the Isle of Wight’s population who cannot benefit from high urban broadband speeds.

“As we march into the 21st century, high-speed broadband continues to move from being a luxury to a necessity,” said Matt Hawkins, MD, C4L. “If Britain is to become a true information economy everyone in the country must have the same ability to access, manipulate and share data.”

“As a result, projects such as Yarmouth Broadband are vital to provide high-speed connections to areas that could otherwise be left behind,” said C4L’s Hawkins. “Of course, any network access is only as good as its connection: this is why we at C4L are proud to be providing the high-capacity, high-redundancy wireless access that will keep the Internet flowing on the Isle of Wight.”

Natural Enterprise will charge users and businesses connected to the Yarmouth exchange its high speed broadband service, at prices from £22.99 per month.

Digital Divide

The initiative highlights the ongoing problems connecting many people in rural or semi rural areas to decent broadband services. At the moment, the UK is facing the risk of a two tier broadband network, with those not in major urban areas, stuck in the broadband slow lane for the foreseeable future.

In December the Countryside Alliance warned of the growing digital divide when it said that there had been a “underwhelming” amount of progress rolling out superfast broadband in rural areas.

This is mostly down to the fact that in reality, the government is actually committing a small sum of money (£530m) into the national rollout of fibre in the UK, via Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK). Indeed, all of this money has already been allocated to various regions.

But this government money is dwarfed by BT’s pledge to invest £2.5 billion to roll out fibre-based broadband to only two thirds of UK premises by the end of 2015.