Broadband gives vital link to rural areas
There was a time — and not so very long ago either — when I filed my copy for this paper over the phone via a long-suffering copy-taker whose job it was to take down our words of wisdom no matter how bad the line or how indecipherable our accents.
But as I recall, at the time, that system struck me as being a pretty stylish way of doing things.
It made me feel as if I were in one of those exciting Hollywood movies, where a journalist would dash from the courtroom clutching their notes, fight their way to the telephone and shout their front-page scoop excitedly into the receiver.
Before this advancement, though — incredible though it might seem now — I had been producing my copy on my state-of-the-art electric typewriter, then drove down to the village and popped my story in the post box.
Then came the fax. My vision of faxes now is that most of them have been consigned to cobwebby cupboards until someone’s doing a spring clean and then out they go. But like any new invention in the fast-moving field of telecommunication, when the fax machine first arrived, it was as if all our tomorrows had come at once.
Before I managed to acquire a fax of my own, I have a clear picture of clutching my latest story and heading for the hotel in the village. Word was out that they had just got a fax machine. And since the manager was an obliging sort of chap, I was sure that he wouldn’t mind my using it.
He didn’t. In fact, he was proud to be the first one in our village to acquire a fax, which he kept in pride of place on the reception desk.
But the problem with that arrangement was that when the hotel was busy and a coach-load of tourists had just arrived, he, reasonably enough, had to deal with the paying customers first before sending my story winging its way to the Examiner offices. Sometimes I could be pacing up and down for an hour or more.
Today, of course, it’s a very different story. Emails and broadband abound, even in the remoter corners of the island, although speed and reliability might lag sadly behind the rest of Europe. But no matter what the speed, the fact is that broadband has become an essential component to our daily lives — and particularly for those who live in rural areas.
When broadband first arrived, many people in rural areas were restricted to the dial-up system, frustratingly slow, given to abrupt termination and sometimes impossible to access when too many of your neighbours had the same idea.
“If Ireland is to compete in today’s market, a high broadband speed is a necessity, especially in places like West Cork,” Cork South West TD Noel Harrington says. “Small- and medium-size businesses need high speed broadband if they are to compete in a fair and equitable manner with those in better connected parts of Ireland.”
In my area, our first always-on service came about, as is often the way, as a result of the community doing it for themselves with the assistance of the newly established Digitalforge. I spoke to its owner and passionate proponent of all things IT, Brendan Hurley.
*You are originally from Schull Brendan. How did you end up returning there?
>>“Well. I’d been away for about 20 years and always worked in IT — for Cisco, Microsoft and Red Hat, working as a certified computer professional for companies in London and New York.
“My Kiwi wife Jane and I had three young children and we decided that we wanted to come back to live in Schull. I began Digitalforge in 2004, when I discovered there was no broadband available in Schull, or indeed, most rural areas of West Cork.”
*That must have been a shock to the system for you?
>>“It really was. The thing was, if I wanted to work in my field it would have meant commuting to Cork every day and I wasn’t prepared to do that. So, although I had no contacts, I set about seeing what could be done. It was obvious that fibre was the best option, but the cost of getting it to West Cork would have been horrendous.”
*So what was your next step?
>>“The only thing for it was to go hill to hill. The people in communities where we wanted to set up schemes were invariably very helpful. We had to do a lot of walking though, and a lot of assessing viability. Satellite systems can be affected by something as simple as the leaves on the trees.
“But I have a deeply held belief that the Internet can’t go down — not ever. ‘Online all the time’ is our motto.”
*As you know well I’m sure, we can have some pretty bad storms in these parts. What happens then?
>>“What happens then is I can’t sleep. In the recent bad storm we had I was up at Mount Gabriel at three o’clock in the morning to make sure that everything was all right. It was the same thing when we had the furze fire in Goleen recently. I was out there with my shovel. IT is my passion and being a local service and in touch with our customers on a regular basis, I know just how important it is for them.”
*What changes would you like to see now?
>>“There are 60 smaller providers like ourselves and I think it would be good if we came together, became a block to petition for improvements funding, and better access Digitalforge is providing a wider range of services for our customers all the time, and we intend to go on pushing forward the boundaries of technology. In today’s world, a fast, reliable broadband technology’s vital to the survival of rural communities.”
