Rural Shropshire Gains 50Mbps Wireless Broadband from Unitron Network

Unitron (Userve Internet), an I.T services company, has spent £50,000 of its own money to develop a new 50Mbps capable superfast broadband wireless network that can cover both urban and rural parts of Shropshire (i.e. mostly around Shrewsbury, Newport and Telford) in England.

According to the Shropshire Star, the service is distributed from a new “dish” that has been installed on top of The Wrekin (a hill in east Shropshire that sits proud above the surrounding and largely flat terrain). This dish, which links back to the ISPs HQ in Stafford Park, gives the network a line-of-sight towards many local premises in a 15km radius.

Steve Griffin, CEO of Unitron, said:

“We are already working with wireless technology on five sites, and we have been working towards getting up on The Wrekin as the coverage is massive. Whilst listening to many people and the media discussing issues with rural broadband in Shropshire, we have made our own investment to provide what we believe to be the future for rural high-speed broadband.”

It’s understood that it took 12 months of on-going negotiations with mast owner Arqiva before the dish could be installed and further expansion is now being planning for several other key sites around the region.

Prices for the “Standard Plan” packages, which are accompanied by a minimum contract term of 12 months, start at £29.99 +vat per month for a 10Mbps (1Mbps upload) connection with a 50:1 contention and 50GB (GigaBytes) usage allowance (£199 setup). Meanwhile the top plan will set you back £99.99 per month (£249 setup) for a 20Mbps (5Mbps upload) link with “unlimited” use (Fair Usage Policy).

It should be noted that the FUP, which is set at 70GB per month, threatens to impose traffic shaping upon customers that don’t “modify their usage“, although the policy is otherwise somewhat vague. Never the less this is still a good development, even though 10Mbps for £29.99 +vat seems a little pricey by modern standards (perhaps less so if you could only get sub-2Mbps before).