Tay Forest Park Communities in Scotland Get 20Mb Wireless Broadband

The Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) has announced that a new project, which is being funded by £58,500 from Community Broadband Scotland (CBS), Perth and Kinross Council and the Griffin Windfarm Fund, will imminently help to connect several rural villages that circle Tay Forest Park (Amulree, Trochry and Struan) to a new fixed wireless broadband network.

Apparently many in the area struggle to receive broadband download speeds of even 1Mbps (Megabits per second) and as a result a number of community volunteers setup the Highland Perthshire Communities Partnership (HPCP). Readers might recall that we first touched on this plan last July 2014 (here), but since then plenty of progress has been made.

The building work for five small-scale telecoms masts has almost completed and the group’s ambition is to add more to ensure that “no one in Highland Perthshire is left behind“. The HIE’s press release talks about broadband speeds of “as much as” 20Mbps being delivered, although HPCP’s website talks of being “able to supply 16mbps to areas currently only achieving 0.45mbps, with the possibility of this being significantly increased in the future.”

Shaun Marley of CBS said:

“This project will open up access to homes and businesses locally who have been finding it difficult to carry out even the most basic of online tasks. Better broadband will create new opportunities and benefits and allow people to choose to live, work and learn in what is a beautiful part of the Perthshire countryside.”

According to Bruce Patterson, the partnership’s project officer, the first services could now be ready to go live by Easter 2015. Patterson said that the current roll-out of fixed broadband services in Scotland wasn’t likely to benefit the area for several more years, if at all, and they were “concerned that without good services soon then businesses and communities will struggle – and by doing this ourselves we can offer a way forward“.

The projects’ ambition going forward is to “ensure that the whole of Highland Perthshire is a wi-fi zone” and, as a community business, all of their profits will be poured back into the business and their local communities.