Pencaitland Community reps attended a Winton House workshop looking at how the county should look in the future. The top message was fast rural broadband.
A powerful theme throughout the gathering and echoed by all was that fast, effective and reliable broadband in rural parts of the county is absolutely critical to maintaining a competitive future for the county.
Below we have reproduced the press release that came out of this meeting.
Divided into a number of round-table groups, each highlighted the critical role that fast broadband infrastructure will play in a successful future for rural East Lothian.PRESS RELEASE: Communities, landowners and businesses based in the East Lothian countryside are being encouraged to contribute their views to the new Local Development Plan. To encourage debate and contributions, a ‘Rural Voice’ workshop was jointly organised last week by East Lothian
Council and Chalmers & Co, the Haddington based surveyors and architects.
The Council and Chalmers & Co have a shared interest in ‘shaping the countryside’ in East Lothian to ensure that its communities thrive as a place to work and play.
The forum brought together a wide-ranging rural voice of around 40 landowners, farmers, countryside businesses, community groups and government organisations at Winton House. Facilitated by Nick Wright and Richard Heggie of Urban Animation, they explored what that thriving countryside might look like in 10 to 15 years time, and how changes to planning rules could help that vision become real.
Co-operative company Lothian Broadband is on a mission to discover just how poorly served the rural communities of East Lothian are with internet access over phone lines.
Despite all the constant press advertising for super-fast services the reality is that for rural communities and villages such as Pencaitland, the chances of getting it are almost non-existent.
Now Lothian Broadband, which started many years ago, providing wireless internet initially to Garvald & Morham, is aiming to ramp up its super-fast wireless web solution for other communities that have thus far been left in the slow lane of the so-called information super-highway.
How you can help
To help the team at Lothian Broadband understand where the not-spots are around East Lothian point your web browser at http://speedtest.net, run the test (it’s free) and then, once you see the results please then share them by posting the provided link either to Twitter @lothianbb or to the Facebook page for the co-operative company.
And if you can, please also give your postcode. Here’s what a typical result from Speedtest looks like.
What a speedtest result looks like: In this case it shows very poor performance for a broadband user living in Pencaitland. Click the image above to see how your broadband performs.
Here are a few video examples from the last couple of days. The first was taken from a house just next to the Mercat Cross in Wester Pencaitland which is fairly close to the local phone exchange at the other end of the village.
By contrast, here’s David Walls’ test which is many miles from any phone exchanges, enjoying far better broadband than about 95% of the rest of the UK population (and all of Pencaitland by a huge margin).
Like so many digital services we have increasingly come to rely on, many require a minimum upload or download speed to operate reliably. Ten years ago there was no option to have Skype video calls with family in some far flung part of the world. Equally there was no BBC iPlayer catch-up service nor emerging digital video rental services like NetFlix which let you watch movies for a modest monthly charge.
Today, as more people spend some of their working week in a home office, it’s less of a luxury and much more a vital necessity.
The problem is, for rural communities in East Lothian these services are out of reach to most as the basic infrastructure we have today simply can’t cope. There’s no prospect of services like BT’s Infinity here; without the actions being taken by Lothian Broadband, and others like it across the UK, we will be waiting for an infinity to see any significant improvements.
And for those who live far from an exchange, even when these improvements do eventually arrive they are unlikely to make much difference for those living 5+ miles away.
Broadband Survey – Pencaitland/New Winton/Glenkinchie Area
Because of the variable speed and quality of broadband available in and around the village of Pencaitland and other outlying communities, Pencaitland Community Council has been looking into alternatives to the conventional Internet Service Providers who supply internet services through your telephone line connecting to the local Pencaitland BT exchange.
One alternative would be a wireless high speed system, giving coverage to homes and businesses in the area via a small external wireless receiver/transmitter on your house or office which can attach to your existing TV aerial.
As part of East Lothian’s Local Development Plan Community Councils and individuals across the county were asked to take part in the process, offering their views and key concerns. These will hopefully be taken up by ELC and replace the current East Lothian Local Plan 2008.
We would like to thank all those who have already participated in our Broadband Survey. This is in order to establish whether there is sufficient demand to investigate provision of high speed wireless broadband offering a starting speed of 20Mbps which would cover Pencaitland and other outlying rural areas and villages.
But we still need more participants in order to make the survey sample as representative as possible. If you have already taken part in the survey, please take a moment to tell your neighbours and ask them to visit this site to take part.
We’ve created a shortlink to make it easy for people to find the survey, which can be filled in at: http://bit.ly/BB-survey
Meantime, here’s a snapshot of how people use the Internet in and around the village. It comes as no surprise that almost everyone uses the Internet to access email and the web, but a surprisingly high 87% also use services such as the BBC’s iPlayer catch-up service. Nearly half also upload material to services like YouTube or Flickr.
The local media recently picked up on some of the preliminary statistics coming out of the Broadband Working Group’s efforts to find out how people feel about current local provision of broadband service.
Click the image above to read the article from East Lothian News
The Broadband Working Group has been exploring practical solutions for bringing high-speed wireless broadband service to this part of East Lothian, in conjunction with the existing development of a working system by Lothian Broadband — a co-operative company set up to introduce a wireless 20Mbps service to a large geographical area roughly south of Haddington.
Extending this service to Pencaitland would deliver a similar speed of service, eventually with the potential to rise to 50Mbps, whether uploading or downloading from the internet.
If you haven’t had a chance to take the short survey please do so now. Your views will help inform any final decision your Community Council takes on an independent solution to rural broadband provision.
