Introduction

Benderloch is one of the villages that will benefit from the rollout of 'superfast' fibre broadband to rural areas of Scotland. This is scheduled for activation at the end of August 2014 (previously July 2014).

This blog is intended to summarise my findings on how this will impact internet access for our business located on the Tralee Road to South Shian, and to clarify some initial misconceptions about rural 'superfast' broadband.

In this blog, I refer to 'superfast broadband', 'fibre broadband', 'FTTC' and 'FTTP'. These all define the same new broadband that is to be rolled out at the Ledaig and Taynuilt exchanges - namely VDSL2.

I also refer to "BT" - it should be noted that there exist different subsidiaries that we often conglomorate as BT -
"Openreach" who manage the infrastructure -  physical cables, cabinets etc. These are the guys climbing the poles, digging up the roads (with their contractors), and visiting your home to fix your sockets. They are also installing the new FTTC cabinets and fibre connections right back to the point-of-handover to BT Wholesale's 21CN WBC in the exchange. You might see "Superfast fibre" Openreach vans in your vicinity, working on the copper wires too. This is apparently just the way all Openreach vans are being branded, not just those working on superfast fibre broadband connections.

"BT wholesale"  who manage the networks and underlying data transport infrastructure. They transport the data from the exchange onto BTs backhaul network and on to your ISP/the rest of the internet
"BT Retail" - who you rent your telephone and possibly your internet from as well.