Snail mail....

Love em or loath em, computers and the internet are part and parcel of everyday life in Dumfropolis and beyond. Therefore it was with little surprise and only the merest raising of an eyebrow that this Commonty correspondent was coloured unsurprised by the revelation that Dumfries has the fourth slowest broadband speeds in all of these isles.


In a previous life,I  attended many dull and frankly tedious meetings about bringing this new fangled interweb to the geographically challenged of D&G. It was a tad annoying to discover that the actual high speed fibre optic cable that churns out the internet at a rate of several gagazillion bytes per second in Glasgow and London, runs directly alongside the M74, without pausing for a rest in any of our luxurious service stations. Apparently all that is lacking is the political will to bash British Telecom about the head until they agree to run cables betwixt Stranraer and Langholm, and thus drag us into the heady world of speedy communications.


The feller Hunt, who's in charge of Culture on the other side of the Sark, has a pot of some £530m to bring Blighty up to the speeds currently enjoyed by Slovenia and the like. Admirably he decided to allocate Scotland a figure of some £68.8millions. A fine enough sum, one might think, however his department arrived at this figure based on the normally redoubtable system of population percentage. Sadly DCMS didn't factor in the actual geographic proportions of Scotland which covers approximately one-third of the UK and therefore should equate to one-third of the UK pot...  


Here's the article from the Scotsman...



Dumfries suffers life in the broadband slow lane


Published on Thursday 23 February 2012 01:18
Dumfries is one of the UK’s broadband blackspots, according to research by uSwitch.com.
More than a third of UK postcodes receive average broadband download speeds of 5Mb per second or less, while one in ten has speeds of 3Mbp/s or less – at least six times slower than even the basic super-fast broadband speed of 20Mbp/s.
Dumfries is the fourth-worst town in Britain, with an average download speed of 3.6Mbp/s, while the PA6 postcode in Renfrewshire is among the worst overall, at 1.806Mbp/s.
Julia Stent, director of telecoms at uSwitch.com, said: “Britain might be riding the wave of a super-fast broadband revolution, but for the 49 per cent who get less than the national average broadband speed, the wave isn’t causing so much a splash as a ripple.”
Virgin Media announced recently that its super-fast broadband with speeds of up to 100Mbp/s is now available to ten million homes in the UK, while BT pledged this month that it will offer “ultra-fast” broadband speeds of up 300Mbp/s by spring 2013 – but not every area has access to these faster speeds.
The government vowed in December 2010 that everyone in the UK would have access to super-fast broadband by 2015.


Posted by MMac


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