Shetland Telecom Boss Slams UK’s Broadband Strategy as “Madness”

Q2. What was the local broadband infrastructure situation like on the Shetland Islands before the project began?

ANSWER:

The big problem we faced in Shetland was unreliable, expensive and very limited backhaul capacity. Until our project was up and running, Shetland relied on microwave links which operated over many hops to the UK mainland. These links are outdated and are affected by atmospherics and weather conditions. When they go down, Shetland grinds to a halt. Businesses simply can’t function without telecommunications. Everything from the oil companies to the local shops can’t do business. Our transport system also fails because the main airport closes. We simply had to have a better solution. Faroese Telecom have a fibre optic cable which crosses Shetland but the Telcos were not interested in utilising it. We took the decision that Shetland needed the connection, so we made it happen. Shetland now has resilient, high capacity fibre connections to the outside world.

Q3. What kind of services or general broadband improvement do you expect to see island residents and or businesses get after the work is complete?

ANSWER:

A number of businesses are already seeing the benefits. We have a local ISP who is now able to provide much-improved bandwidths on their network. Their customers range from very small one or two person firms right through to oil companies.

Although Shetland is a very small group of islands, we do have a number of multinational companies operating here. Telecoms and travel routes are key to attracting inward investment. We were faced with the situation where companies were being forced to relocate or move personnel from Shetland because they simply couldn’t operate here due to the limitations of the telecoms services. The reverse is now true and a number of UK and foreign companies have already seen the potential for doing more of their operations from Shetland.

We operate two small community broadband networks. These areas have seen job creation and in the case of Fetlar (a very small island community) a reversal of the population decline.

Q4. What has been the most challenging and or costly aspects of your work to lay fibre optic cable around such a remote island community?

ANSWER:

We have faced a myriad of obstacles in the process but having a clear a defined strategy has been the key. Being a new operator we have had to learn on our feet. We don’t have much in the way of resources so what we do have, has had to be used wisely. We spent a long while in the planning. We have also had a lot of help from outside of Shetland. Many people and many organisations have helped us because we are doing something completely different. From the outset we saw the need to own (or at least have a stake in) the infrastructure. The network belongs to Shetland.

Q5. We’ve heard about several community projects making use of the new infrastructure but will any big ISPs, such as BT, also be able to benefit in order to improve their existing services?

ANSWER:

BT are more than welcome to use our infrastructure. The network is open access and everybody and anybody is welcome to use it. At the same time though, we are not sitting about waiting for the large service providers. If we have to go further and do more we will.

ISPr EDITORS NOTE: Since asking this question BT has confirmed that part of their new £8m fibre optic link to the Shetland Islands will involve using Shetland Telecom’s fibre to give them a route from Lerwick to Maywick (full details of the project).