As the nation struggled under the burden of The Beast from the East, many of us in metropolitan areas were able to keep working due to good use of Cloud services for accessing emails and the use of hosted phone systems to work from elsewhere.
As the extremity of the weather that we see seems to increase year on year, spare a thought for businesses in rural locations who are continuing to genuinely struggle with poor broadband provision.
I was very interested to read The Scotsman Article yesterday concerning Glencoe Mountain Ski Resort – a resort that, by popular local repute, on a good day can be as good as skiing in Colorado!
Despite having a full fibre local area network, up and down the hills, they are so poorly served by broadband that their business is materially affected. There are options available, but at a high cost, and if rural businesses are to be capable of operating on a level playing field with their Metropolitan cousins, more must be done!
"At the moment we're relying solely on mobile data to take card payments, send emails, do everything, because the [landline] connection we get from BT is so bad. We get a maximum of 0.2 mbps [megabytes per second] on old copper lines that run through one of the oldest exchanges in the country at the King's House Hotel. If we lose our mobile signal we're basically just dead in the water. We can't do emails, we can't do payroll, we can't do anything." *
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