Long time no hear, speak, type (whatever).

Yes it has been a long time hasn't it nearly a whole year!. Almost forgot about this place. But thanks to Steve Holroyd who gave me a virtual kick up the butt recently about not updating the site. I realised he was quite right. So here here's a rundown on what been happening.

Most of Morayshire now has access to ADSL Broadband! Only a few areas remain without Broadband:
  Clochan - Goes Live 17th August 2005!
  Grange - Goes Live 17th August 2005!
  Orton - Goes Live 7th November 2005!
  Mulben - Goes Live 31st December 2005! . o O (Someone's having a laugh surely!)

Once these exchanges are upgraded then that will be 100% coverage of ADSL Broadband in Morayshire! Let's hope that date for Mulben doesn't get put any further back sheesh!

So what's next? Well SDSL will be the next thing, Where ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) limits you to 512kbit (approx 30kB/sec) on upload no matter what speed of connection you have, SDSL (Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line) means that the upload speed and the download speed of your connection are the same, i.e. Symmetrical.;) As you might expect SDSL is quite expensive, not only that it's only available in major cities in the UK. Just like ADSL was a few years ago so that's something to look forward to.

But what's happening more recently is that BT-Wholesale (Not the Internet Service provider, BT-Wholesale is the part of BT that deals with the exchanges and the links to our homes and businesses) have changed the way they charge ISP's to use their service. Instead of charging for the speed of each connection they now charge your ISP by the amount of data that is transferred. This means two things, ISP's start to place limits on their connections to try and encourage you to use low amounts of data transfer each month to keep costs low. But the major advantage to this is that it doesn't matter whether you have a 512kbit or 2Mbit connection, the cost should be exactly the same! So if you are still sitting on 512kbit then get in touch with your ISP and ask them about getting a free upgrade or something, because you deserve it! Failing that change your ISP to one that will give you the fastest speed possible for your line (Try PlusNET they will give you up to 2Mbit and free activation for as little as £14.99/month, whoops! got carried away there.) currently a maximum of 2Mbit is available in this area.

Speaking of which, there are trials for speeds of up to 8Mbit speeds for ADSL, which is nice to know, so far trials are going well and we can start to see a UK rollout starting towards the end of the year. No idea when they will get round to us but it does mean that those closer to the exchange than me will be able to take full advantage of 8Mbit Speeds, that's downloading at nearly 1Megabyte every second! Wheeeeee! I doubt the Internet will bea able to keep up LOL!

Well I think that just about covers everything. Inlight of the end of the campaign for Broadband in Lhanbryde, I've opened up the forums a little to allow for more local discussions, any local events, news, sales or whatever, why not use the forums to advertise local stuff for free!!

Bubye for now!

Alan Addison (Founder of Broadband4Lhanbryde)