Rutland Telecom (RT), founded by David Lewis (Managing Director) and Mark Melluish (Director & Rural LLU Consultant) in 2007, is a UK Internet Service Provider (ISP) that specialises in providing Next Generation Access (NGA) broadband to rural areas. The provider is uniquely recognised in industry as the first UK Communications Provider to develop superfast NGA 40Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) broadband with full access to copper lines and into premises.
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This recently took place in the testbed rural village of Lyddington and will now be deployed to a number of isolated rural villages in Rutland and beyond, including the tiny Welsh village of Erbistock. As a result RT's boss, David Lewis, has an interesting and often outspoken view of the country's current rural broadband woes. This interview with David Lewis delves into some of the problems that RT has faced while rolling out its new solutions to rural areas and also reveals the ISPs concerns with other issues, such as the recently passed Digital Economy Act 2010 (DEA) and BT Openreach's conflict of interest. 1. Rutland Telecom has just become the first community ISP in the UK to offer an unbundled style 'up to' 40Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) broadband solution (subloop FTTC using full metallic path[MPF]) in the remote rural village of Lyddington, which is soon to be followed by a similar project in the Welsh village of Erbistock. BT is also making extensive use of FTTC technology to reach 40% of UK homes by 2012, which should also bring download speeds of up to 40Mbps and uploads of up to 10Mbps. What else makes Rutland's FTTC service uniquely different from BT's implementation?
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