Want Fast Broadband? Dig It Yourself

A group of residents in Alston in Cumbria, UK, have taken upgrading their broadband lines into their own hands in a bid to get fibre optic 20mb speeds.

For a large majority of people that live in remote areas of the UK, getting fast or any broadband at all can be troublesome due to installation costs not being a viable business option for networks such as BT.

With BT providing mediocre speeds originally that began only 4 years ago, they switched to Cybermoor after a series of campaigns, a company that uses transmitters to deliver as much as 10mbps of broadband to remote areas.

Though even this amount of data, in particularly for businesses and even local industries that rely on the Internet may not be necessarily enough and subsequently are installing fibre optics themselves.

Jeremy Higgs, owner of Pennine Ways estate agent in Alston reiterated the importance of good internet speeds “Just last month we let a property to a lady who works from home and needs broadband. She wouldn’t be here without it.”

Although this has happened on a relatively small scale, a future where upgrading our own lines could be the norm, especially with the Government only committed to providing everyone with 2mb lines.  With a potential £42 tax per phone line the cost of doing this, home owners may turn to networks like Virgin Media who can currently install a 50mb fibre optic line for free.

It’s another story that epitomises how far behind the UK is falling in terms of our communications infrastructure in that some customers are actually digging and installing the broadband lines themselves.