In 2001, the Scottish Executive set out its strategy for extending broadband coverage in Scotland. Its report stated “We will start where the task is toughest, if we are to ensure no part of Scotland misses out:  the Highlands and Islands and the South of Scotland”.

The front page of that report has a picture of a Highland village - Arnisdale. After five years and millions of pounds of investment by the Scottish Executive, Arnisdale does not have broadband and currently has  no prospect of getting it
Click here for the full picture and report

2 June 2008.  I haven't  touched this website for more than a year. The news from Scottish Government and BT has become increasingly depressing.  However, there is some good news: I have been helping with a new research project supported by the University of Edinburgh and the University of the Highlands and Islands
www.tegola.org.uk
which is using Arnisdale as a testbed for research into providing affordable high-quality broadband to rural areas.  Please visit it and see what we are doing.

Contents

Our situation

Arnisdale and the adjacent village of Corran form a small community that has recently enjoyed something of a rebirth, with a standing population of about 40 and 9 children of school age. A few years ago there were only two such children. Consider the problems we face, a rural community without broadband.
If broadband is important to all communities in Scotland, in the Higlands and Islands, it is absolutely essential to the outlying communities. This was recognised by the Scottish Executive, but they have failed to deliver to communities such as Arnisdale.

For several years, British Telecom (BT) has pursued a policy of connecting outlying communities by dropping copper cable alongside roads. This has proved to be singularly shortsighted.  The cables are easily broken by vehicles driving over them; their transmission properties, even for analogue modems, are not as good as old-fashioned telephone pole technology; and they are a useless  for broadband.  


BT-Cable  
This is an example of a BT cable.  The cable was originally laid alongside the road, but was smashed by passing traffic.  A BT engineer moved the cable to a place on the shore where a tree was uprooted in the last storm! In the next storm, people in Arnisdale are unlikely to have telephone connections -- when they most need them. And mobiles don't work in Arnisdale.
There are various estimates of how far broadband will reach over copper wire: distance is not the only factor; it also depends on the quality of the cable. However, none of the estimates comes close to 9 miles, the approximate distance between Arnisdale and its exchange in Glenelg, which now has broadband.

In mid 2005 the we received flyers from BT telling us that broadband was available from BT.  Some of us assumed that BT had installed new technology that would make broadband possible. But the flyer was a lie,  as anyone who inquired about the availability of broadband found out.  BT had simply not bothered to check which areas surrounding the Glenelg exchange could actually receive broadband.  The author, who like many, was upset by this wrote to his MP, Charles Kennedy, who passed the letter on to SMP Tavish Scott ("Our commitment is to ensure every community in Scotland will have access to broadband by the end of this year [2005]".) who consulted BT. The only help that Mr Scott gave was to stress the importance of registering interest with the Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) website. Mr. Kennedy wrote back admitting that the answers from BT and Mr. Scott were "unsatisfactory", but offered no further help.

At least 20 of us have registered at the HIE website, some us have done so repeatedly.  Many of us have checked the box that asks HIE to send you information about developments, but no-one has received anything from HIE.

The author also wrote to the head of BT Scotland, Mr. Brendan Dick, and talked to Mr. Stuart Robinson of HIE.  Both confirmed that there are no current plans to provide broadband to Arnisdale.

Why don't we have broadband?

Much of the following is conjecture.  It is difficult to get information about what BT has done and their current policies.

We don't have broadband because the £16.5 million that the Scottish Executive gave BT has now been "spent", and there is no money left to provide Arnidsale with broadband.  Moreover it's not clear how BT would provide broadband to Arnisdale if it wanted to do this.  What BT has done is to upgrade existing exchanges that might have proved uneconomical to upgrade otherwise.  They have not, as claimed in one of their media blurbs achieved a "major engineering task".  They may have upgraded the existing infrastructure, and they have installed standard broadband interfaces in existing exchanges.  

Although BT must be able to form an estimate of how many people in the Highlands are in the same situation as people in Arnisdale, they will not divulge this information, for the mind-boggling reason, according to Mr. Robinson, that the information has "commercial value".  If BT cannot find an economical method of bringing broadband to remote communities, shouldn't they allow other organisations to try?

So we have no idea what priority Arnisdale will be given if there is further funding.

There is a rumour to the effect that the demand for telephone lines in Arnisdale and Corran is about to exceed the capacity of the current cable.  A frightening prospect is that BT will solve this problem simply by running a second cable along the road to Glenelg.  Apparently BT separates its obligation to provide telephone connections from its commercial interest in providing broadband.  An optic fibre to Glenelg or wireless link to Skye would solve both problems and would surely, in the long-term, prove more economical.

The Mason report and further funding

[30 Dec 2006] Scottish Executive has just announced a further £5 million to deliver broadband to the "remaining clusters". There is also a Mason report, commissioned by Scottish Executive, to investigate Broadband availability in Scotland.  The  report is much more informative than anything yet published by the Scottish Executive or British Telecom. In particular it attempts to identify "clusters" -- small communities that  do not yet have broadband.  

The bad news is that Arnisdale, while it surely qualifies as such a cluster on the basis of both population and demand for broadband, was not in Scottish Executive's database; nor was it identified by Mason's mapping software.   Arnisdale gets a short comment in an end-note, and the reason for the lack of  broadband is given as a "local BT cabling problem"!  While not exactly a lie, the statement is about as misleading as it could be.   It indicates that a local fix, not a substantial change to our communications infrastructure is required.  A bureaucrat who is trying to assign priorities is unlikely to put Arnisdale high on the list.

Does Scottish Executive know about us?

[14 Jan 2007] After sending news of the Mason report to the community and to Stuart Robertson, Mr. Harry Emambocus of the Scottish Executive wrote to "reassure you that whilst the cluster in Glenelg/Arnisdale area is not mentioned in detail in the Mason report on Broadband reach, it is one which is known to the Executive, and is on our database of broadband access problems". The correspondence with Mr. Emambocus is far from reassuring.  The only information he provided was the list of potential broadband users we had sent to Stuart Robertson.  He seems to know nothing of the business activities in Arnisdale, and he will not, for reasons -- he claims -- of confidentiality, divulge the costs of providing us with broadband.  Does Scottish Executive have anything like adequate information on which to priortise its expenditure on broadband?  Read the correspondence and form your own opinion.

Business as usual from BT

[14 Jan 2007] Meanwhile, BT continues to live "up" to its reputation.  Some of us have been solicited from people claiming to be BT employees in India, asking us to sign up for broadband.  We also have reason to believe that BT is intending to continue to use 100-year old technology to provide our communications with the rest of the world.

Peter Buneman
The Schoolhouse
Arnisdale, IV40 8JL
Email: 

Previous update: 14 January 2007
Last update: 2 June 2008

Please note that access to this web page is provided by the University of Pennsylvania as a courtesy to the author.  It should be obvious that the opinions expressed on this page are entirely those of the author and are in no way condoned by the University of Pennsylvania.