Northern Orkney Isles Hope for Openreach Radio Broadband Upgrade

The remote rural Orkney islands, specifically the tiny isles of Papay and North Ronaldsay, could be about to see an improvement to their dire local broadband ISP speeds after Openreach (BT) reportedly agreed to at least “investigate the practicalities” of delivering faster connectivity to the area via a new wireless link.

A significant chunk of mainland Orkney has already benefited from the regional Digital Scotland project with Openreach, which has enabled the island to move away from an old Microwave link and instead deploy superfast broadband via the operator’s Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) network (this is supplied by a new sub-sea fibre optic link).

The aforementioned network covers around 75% of homes and businesses (8,500 premises) via 54 new street cabinets, but it doesn’t reach everywhere. For example, the two outlying islands of Papay and North Ronaldsay continue to complain of both unstable connectivity and speeds that struggle to deliver more than 0.5Mbps.

Liam McArthur, Orkney’s MSP, said (The Orcadian):

“It has been suggested to me that radio links could be established quite easily and cost-effectively for both Papay and North Ronaldsay. While this may not achieve the same speeds as some other options, it may at least offer the benefit of a solution in the nearer future. I welcome the fact that BT has agreed to investigate the practicalities of installing radio links.”

Apparently the new radio link, if approved, could lift local broadband speeds up to around 8Mbps. Admittedly this is still fairly dire for 2018 and it’s even below the Government’s proposed USO download speed of 10Mbps+, as well as the Scottish Government’s proposed 30Mbps+ under the R100 programme. Nevertheless going from c.0.5Mbps to 8Mbps would at least be a fairly noticeable jump for local residents.

At this stage it’s unclear precisely what sort of deployment this would be, although we assume that Openreach will seek to build a new Microwave link to feed the local exchange on each island (i.e. giving more capacity to the existing copper line ADSL service). It’s worth noting that this is also one of the few areas that has yet to be upgraded to support BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN).