Cornwall started well ahead of the rest of the UK in the race to bring broadband services into the 21st Century. The BT based roll-out that is part of Superfast Cornwall uses a mixture of FTTC and FTTP, and with the roll-out progressing at a rapid pace the situation is changing weekly.
The 10,000th customer on the new fibre network is Arcol UK who produce and sell power resistors. The service they have is speed testing at around the 92 Mbps mark, and is a full fibre to the premises product, which means the firm already has an upgrade path available to 330 Mbps. The roll-out currently covers some 100,000 properties, which is over a third of the premises in Cornwall.
"Our experience of superfast broadband so far is really superb. The previous broadband line was giving us a download speed of around 1.5 Mbps, whereas our new fibre connection is regularly providing 92 Mbps of data throughput – a colossal difference, which is giving us the ability to do everything much more quickly.
We need to have the ability to constantly reach out to our customers, whether the medium is IP (internet protocol) telephony, video-conferencing or online chat. Superfast broadband has given us many more avenues to cement these important relationships."Alun Morgan, ARCOL's technical director
The original Cornwall plan called for a high proportion of full fibre (FTTP), so once the roll-out reaches its 2014 targets we will be able to assess how well the goals have been met.
The take-up of superfast services in Cornwall is several percentage points higher than the national UK picture, and a lot of this is down to the local publicity and engagement that the project has, building on the previous work of ActNow.
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10 months ago
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10 months ago
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10 months ago
So the easy third is done? Great news for those living in it. How many are on fttp, and are the rest getting the full 'upto' 80meg promised? Is someone keeping a check on it all? Is the reason take up is 10% due to the fact the area covered is already close to cabs and exchanges and therefor most of them already have fairly good connections? Have any notspots been done yet? Kudos if they have.