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Lifeboat's crew make lightning connection
Britain's only full-time lifeboat station, at Spurn Point, uses some the most modern life-saving equipment and the fastest rescue boats. But another piece of kit, the internet connection, is well out of date.
"We've got BT dial-up, which is what everybody had 20 years ago," says the superintendent coxswain of the boat, Dave Steenvoorden. "It's the children of the families which really suffer, especially as the young are so internet-savvy. They're taking five minutes to download a picture from their friends."
On six of the seven days when crew members are on duty, they're not allowed to leave the station, four miles from the mainland along a narrow sandy spit of land. "One of my crew is from Montrose, so a video link with his family now and again would make his life so much better," says Dave.
The limit of their connection's capacity is to look at simple websites for news or emailing. But now all that is about to change. Some of the most modern technology available will connect the lifeboat crew and their families to the internet at speeds which are only available domestically to homes in the Far East.
Work will start this weekend to install a fibre optic connection to the lifeboat station and to each of the seven crew houses.
"The internet comes into the site, initially using a microwave system, from Easington a few miles away," explains Guy Jarvis, a director of Fibrestream, the company installing the new connection. "Then we distribute it using fibre optic cable to the families and the base itself."
The estimated speed is 100 Megabits (Mb) per second. This is about 50 times quicker than most domestic customers receive and about twice as good as the fastest cable connection in major cities. It will allow Spurn to download programmes from the BBC iPlayer in about a minute for an hour-long programme.
Broadband is often supplied at the moment through traditional copper phone cables. Fibre optics are faster and allow customers to use the internet to do several things at once, such as listening to radio programmes while downloading videos.
Fibrestream is putting in the system for free as a demonstration project. Guy Jenkins says it would have cost more than 10,000 if the RNLI had paid to have it. The lifeboat crew members will pay 20 a month for the internet, which is a similar rate to many deals for much slower connections on the mainland.
This small-scale installation can be extended from Spurn Point to the rest of Holderness, bringing high speed broadband to its rural communities.
"We're saying that we can provide 'next generation' internet access to the most remote rural location in Yorkshire, so we can provide a service to other locations which are less remote," says Guy Jarvis. "We're proving a point."
The fibre optic cable can be led from Spurn Point to the mainland and from there it can be buried on the edge of farmers' fields to reach other communities without the expense of having to dig up roads.
Getting to the mainland would cost about 60,000 and the plan is to recoup this money from the monthly subscriptions charged to users. The idea is that the communities served by these high-speed fibre optic cables ultimately own them.
A lack of high speed internet access in rural areas of Yorkshire is a sore point. In North Yorkshire, more than 20 per cent of the population gets less than the 2Mb per second speed of internet which is the target under the Government's Digital Britain report for 2012.
According to the Country Land and Business Association, the CLA, this is harming rural businesses. They have just re-launched a campaign to improve matters. Dorothy Fairburn, the CLA's regional director for Yorkshire, says businesses in the countryside simply can't compete with their urban rivals. "We need a diversified rural economy, and the internet is a critical part of achieving this."
One business which has struggled with poor internet connections is Amplebosom.com, which sells bras and other underwear online from the tiny village of Old Byland, near Helmsley. Its founder and owner Sally Robinson can't get broadband at all over her telephone line because she is too far from the exchange. Instead, she is relying on a satellite for an internet connection which is both slow and intermittent.
"It's like working with your hand tied behind your back," says Sally. "It just makes things slow. It's painful." She has even considered moving her business to a nearby town like Thirsk, where high speed internet access would be easily available. But it's something she's reluctant to do. "My staff are local and we have our premises at home, so I wouldn't want to move."
Guy Jarvis says when BT is asked to allow community fibre-optic projects to use its telegraph poles to string up high speed cable, the rental requested is reasonable. But the conditions the company impose are onerous.
"In the small print, if there's anything wrong with the pole in BT's opinion we have to pay to fix it. We're not allowed to do any installation or maintenance on those poles, we've got to employ BT engineers at BT defined rates which are considerably higher than market rates. If anything is damaged, we have to give 21 days' notice to BT in writing before they'll consider fixing it."
BT says it restricts access to its telegraph poles on safety grounds, and to ensure that the work carried out meets its standards. The company adds it would only impose charges where the damage had been caused by the equipment of the companies which share the poles.
Some local authorities already have very high speed networks in place. North Yorkshire County Council has one to connect its libraries and schools. But European Union rules on state-aid forbid them selling high speed internet access direct to the public. Their lines can, however, be used by companies such as Fibresteam to sell-on internet access where nobody else is prepared to do so.
For the lifeboat crew at Spurn Point a new era is about to dawn, one which Guy Jarvis hopes can be repeated across the region. "It matters because it's about putting tools in people's hands." he says,
"It's about removing the issue of telecommunications as a bottleneck. It's about removing the tyranny of distance, so that everybody in Britain has the same opportunity to learn and be entertained, for employment, for innovation, to be entrepreneurs."
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Friday 10 February 2012
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