Technology all set to broaden the horizons of isolated farms (From Western Telegraph)

Technology all set to broaden the horizons of isolated farms

10:00am Saturday 10th September 2011 in Farming News

Some of Pembrokeshire’s most remote rural farms are likely to have superfast broadband by 2015.

British Telecom’s Wales director, Ann Beynon, says it is almost certain that an extensive network of fibre optic cabling will be in place in rural Wales within four years.

“If BT is successful in the procurement process we are confident we could roll this out by 2015”, she said.

The multi-million initiative would be bigger that the rural fibre optic roll-out currently underway in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. Like Cornwall, Wales is entitled to EU development funding.

Pembrokeshire has several so-called broadband ‘not spots’‚ or ‘slow spots’‚ and these tend to be in rural communities because of their remoteness from main exchanges.

Some communities have overcome these issues by applying for funding through the Welsh Government’s Broadband Support Scheme.

Earlier this year the village of Treleddyd Fawr near St Davids received up to 5Mb broadband after residents made a community bid to the scheme, which enables individuals and groups in remaining Welsh broadband ‘not spots’ to approach internet service providers directly.

Treleddyd Fawr was the first community application to be approved under the initiative after 20 people, including farmers and agricultural contractors, pooled their applications to receive £20,000 of funding.

“With the need for returns to be submitted online for HM Revenue and Customs etc. it is amazing that so many farmers were having to work in the early hours of the morning to complete them using dial-up technology,” said John Warren, who runs a business from home and co-ordinated the application on behalf of the Treleddyd Fawr community.

The Broadband Support Scheme had allowed those in areas where broadband connection speeds were less than 512kbps to access funding for satellite or wireless alternatives, but last month the Welsh Government announced it was extending the scheme to areas where connectivity is less than 2mbps.

It was welcomed by people like John Snowden from Cilgerran in north Pembrokeshire, who had found that the limit of 512kbps had hit his efforts to sign up enough people to make the favoured wireless solution viable.

He said some people in the village were marginally over the top of 512kbps and had not qualified under the original scheme. Prior to the change to the rules being announced last month, they would have had to spend up to £1,000 of their own money for the installation.