My second question concerns broadband.
I've found a considerable amount of information and opinion online concerning broadband services in the Western Isles. However, much it is negative. Though, I have no idea how much of that is exaggerated.
I do not need broadband for work if I move there. However, I do need it for communicating with friends and family back on the "mainland", and around the world. I use Skype in particular; but also the BBC iPlayer and several other online multimedia services.
I require reliability, and a sufficient speed of connection, above all. Is this difficult or impossible to achieve in the Western Isles?
It all depends on your location. If you are near the exchange (within a mile or so), you can expect up to 8 MB/s - as I have in Stornoway. Beyond the range of 3-4 miles, there is the phenomenon of hebrides.net, which provides a wireless broadband service by radiolink. In Berneray (e.g.), this comes from a transmitter in North Uist. The signals get disrupted at certain states of the tide (I'm not joking), and the service from hebrides.et is less than reliable, unfortunately.
ReplyDeleteMobile internet: 3G is present in Stornoway, but outside of town you're looking at GPRS - slow in other words.
As ADB says, including the tides being an issue. It all depends on where you live.
ReplyDeleteI live in Point (about six miles from Stornoway) and I get 8MB/s via ADSL - it just depends if the exchange you're on is ADSL enabled or not (why some aren't enabled is a complex issue) and how far from it you are.
Run a couple of example postcodes through the BT checker to get an idea of what speeds you'll get.
You are limited to BT or one of the BT resellers, there's no ADSL2 or LLU operators operating here at the moment.
I've found the connection reasonably reliable, there's been a couple of minor outages in the last year but nothing more than a couple of hours. So it's not as reliable as what I had on the mainland but it's by no means terrible (it is faster though).
Iplayer works OK - there's odd times when it stutters but since I never used it on the mainland I can't comment on if that happens on the mainland as well.
If you move to a region which isn't covered by ADSL then you're limited to hebrides.net which has a maximum of 1MB and it can be unreliable and I have read a lot of complaints about the service but not using the service means I can't comment on the validity of the claims.
This connection would not be suitable for running iPlayer - it's much too slow.
Christ, where to start. The Hebrides.net thing is as close to a scam, while remaining just about legal, as could be. This would not happen anywhere else without investigations and a sacking, but as it's the Outer Hebrides, the con artist in charge of it ended up getting a gong from the queen.
ReplyDeleteThe tide thing was not made up. Ally first figured it out on Berneray, then we noticed it.
It got to the point that while Hebrides.net, Western Isles Enterprise and the Comhairle were telling the world that the islands had "State of the art" broadband, I had a fucking tide time chart on my office wall so I knew when my broadband would go on or off. And no, I'm not making that up. In one of the rare instances of Donnie Morrison being honest, he did admit this, and some journalists reported it.
Basically, the system should never have been installed as it was unsuitable for the islands. As the army and BT, who had experimented with the technology previously, knew. But it was, and several million pounds of public money was spent on connecting around a thousand households to the net. With the high charges, low speeds, unreliability, and the pathetic caps on monthly use, a lot of places signed up only because there's no alternative. When BT or a legitimate provider do cover the islands, you watch as people break their Hebrides.net contracts.
Basically, if you rely on having decent broadband for work or home life, then do not move to Berneray or any of the other communities which only offer Hebrides.net. Move to Stornoway or somewhere that offers a proper broadband service through BT or some other big mainland provider. Several people do use Hebrides.net (also laughably called Connected Communities, or more accurately ConCom) on Berneray for work, but they get their work done despite of it, rather than because of it.
When you go back to Berneray, seek out George and ask him for the details about it. He was on it for a while until they got fed up of his complaints and permanently disconnected him.