The Skyenet service was established by Sleat Community Trust (SCT) to ensure identified areas of Sleat and Strathaird will not be disadvantaged in their access to government-sponsored broadband service upgrades planned for the area. Throughout this process we have worked with Community Broadband Scotland, which was set up by the Scottish Government to help establish local community broadband solutions.
This page explains why our technology is the ‘best fit’ for the areas we cover and why Community Broadband is the answer to the problem of poor rural broadband signals.
For Signal & Quality
Wireless technology is the best fit for rural and isolated areas, and is the technological basis for satellite and community modes of broadband provision. The technology works by creating a point-to-point link capable of transmitting a signal from one end to the other without losing signal speed or quality.
Without Wireless, households across Skye recieve their broadband signal over telephone cable, which works well over relatively short distances, but doesn’t work well if you live more than a mile from the nearest telephone exchange, particularly if that exchange is capped by BT. The reason for this is that signal quality is diminished over the distance of cable run.
When we began the Skyenet service we bypassed the telephone cables and delivered the best broadband signal available from the exchanges. However, since late 2016, we have been able to access good quality and affordable backhaul from the innovative West Coast Backbone (WCB) and offer an improved service for our subscribers.
Community Broadband
Sleat Community Trust has worked in partnership with Community Broadband Scotland to identify areas in South Skye where broadband service speeds will not be significantly improved to bring service levels above the minimum threshhold set by the Scottish Government. In late 2014 we were awarded part-funding for the network by Community Broadband Sccotland, which we built in early 2015. This infrastructure will ensure that these areas will no longer be disadvantaged by their distance from the core UK network (BT) for the foreseeable future.
Community Broadband is a relatively new concept, and has followed on from the work of early pioneers in places such as Arnisdale. It encompasses various organisations that take on the establishment and running of their own community broadband network to serve users from within their own community with the best signal speeds available elsewhere.
If you are interested to find out more you can have a look at some of the other neighbouring Community Broadband Networks currently in operation, a few of which SCT has worked with on this project:
- HebNet
- Tegola
- Badenoch Broadband
- AppleNet (Applecross CC)