Rollout Plan Revealed for £4.3m Orkney 5G Rural Broadband Trial

Broadband slow-spots in several remote parts of the Orkney islands (Scotland) could soon gain access to superfast broadband download speeds of up to 70Mbps (20Mbps upload) as part of the 5G based “RuralFirst” project, which earlier this year (here) was awarded a public grant worth £4.3m to help test the new wireless tech.

At present the existing Digital Scotland programme with Openreach (BT) has already helped to extend fixed-line “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) networks on the island, which using Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) technology can now cover around 75% of homes and businesses (8,500 premises) via 54 new street cabinets, but it doesn’t reach everywhere.

Meanwhile the 5G RuralFirst project, led by Cisco and the University of Strathclyde, has confirmed that it aims to start the new trial before the end of 2018. Some of the areas to benefit will include selected properties in Sanday, North Ronaldsay, St Margaret’s Hope and Burray. The effort will also test broadcast radio over 5G to participants in Stronsay and hopes to improve connectivity for both a salmon farm, and a wind farm.

The original announcement said, “[this] project will integrate spectrum sharing strategies for 5G; bringing connectivity to rural communities, enabling smart farming in partnership with Agri-Epi Centre (including drones, autonomous farm vehicles and remote veterinary inspections); innovative methods of delivering broadcast radio over 5G working with the BBC, alongside the delivery of 5G connectivity for IoT in utility and other industries in rural areas.”

The project is also supposed to be conducting related trials in the farmlands of Shropshire and Somerset, although so far no solid details have been released for those. However it’s important to stress that these are merely experiments using 5G class technology and are not to be confused with the future commercial roll-out of commercial 5G mobile networks via Three UK, Vodafone, O2 or EE, which will use a different setup.

At this stage we don’t know anything about what spectrum bands will be used for the trial or how the networks will be physically setup. On top of that Cisco has warned that their timetable could be affected by the imminent arrival of winter, which tends to bring some very rough weather.