Three of BT's managers flew into the Shetland isles yesterday with the goal of informing residents about what had been done to rectify the areas many broadband connectivity and performance woes of the past two years.

Readers may recall that the villages of Vidlin and Uyeasound were left without broadband for over a day during June (here), while Northmavine and Unst are known to have suffered similar faults. Outages of up to three days are apparently not uncommon.

Naturally much of the frustration surrounding these problems has been vented towards BT, which was keen to stress that "it was an unusual problem" and took longer than expected to resolve.

The curious fault caused data transfers to be blocked when a voice phone call was made. ADSL technology usually splits a single line into two different parts, one for voice and one for data, both of which should be usable at the same time; BT ultimately needed to replace the charged cards to fix the fault.

The Shetland News reports that BT also had some bad news for residents, with the operator reportedly informing the meeting that there would be no upgrading of the out of town 0.5Mbps ADSL service until at least 2012.

Naturally BT's ability to bring its modernised 21CN network to the remotest parts of the UK often requires a feasible economic case to be made first. The lobbying for more rural broadband funding is expected to start soon.