Don't have a helpful local neighbourhood. People are too hard up or stingy or completely uninterested. The majority have FTTC in the village of broadford and are laughing, if they could even be bothered enough to pay the extra tenner, or have even heard about FTTC. We don't have a suitable mode to run FTTP from that is already close. And don't have the population size either.
I'm not the one to evangelise either, as no one knows me, haven't been out of the house in 8 years of course, so hardly mr popular, plus I’m a foreigner, and even worse a Gàidhlig-speaking one (after a fashion, as best my abilities, tertiary education and immersion will allow).
It is a tame politician that we unimportant few need, someone who decides that it isn't just all about profits, that fairness matters, and saying that the last x% can go to hell is simply not actually on, but hey it's job done because they can quote ‘some percentage done’ those people being those who were always the least in need anyway because they had speeds that were 3 to 20 times faster before. The USO is going to be just ridiculous with some impossible ‘delivery’ of 10Mbps downstream (and erm what's upstream), which is impossible anyway, whilst by then the haves will be heading for 300Mbps as if 80 times the rest of us were not a big enough gap already.
We are so few that it's not even like it's going to bankrupt the country sorting out the grossest inequalities. Should people really be on less than 1 Mbps d/s nowadays, yet getting charged the same as others on 20Mbps ADSL2+? At 2.7-2.9 Mbps sync rate I am the best in my tiny village, and way more than double most people. My hope is that pervasive fibre (not the fake BT kind made out of copper) will bring all of this crap to an end because presumably whenever future upgrades are needed you just upgrade the optical hardware at the ends and add core bandwidth if need be, at least that's the impression of history is accurate that I get from my almost nonexistent knowledge of fibre optic hardware. The speed gap showing on the Skye part of the thinkbroadband (TBB) map is >40-to-1 in downstream. However the map is possibly amazingly unrepresentative as it may be that it is only a certain type of person who will record their speed tests on their, some geeks who are checking out their connection speed, plus some frustrated users, but the clueless won’t know about the site and will probably have some horrible bandwidth figures in their number because they don't know how to improve things or couldn't care less. I find it very hard to believe anyway that the true figures are better than the picture the TBB map paints.
Part of the money that has been spent on FTTC around here is presumably wasted, but not all, but the big problem is that it lets the politicians off the hook by creating a distraction, another 5-10 years worth of delay and a double spend in part of the job for absolutely everyone who actually is bothered about decent internet performance.
