As you may, or may not, be aware, our broadband is pretty poor at best and, at worst, non-existent which is recently becoming more and more often.

The constant promises of better faster broadband by BT is not coming to us.  Not never, apparently.

If we (I mean my local area of the West Mainland – Walls and Sandness) want to have full-fibre connection, we have to ask the Scottish Government for the project to go ahead. It will not happen automatically.  This has to be a community project for it to go ahead because the Government funding is linked to individual households and not to the general area.  Folk have to come together to get this to work.

So OH and I were driving around in our given area distributing leaflets about this to every householder asking them to fill out an “expression of interest form”.

At this stage, there would be absolutely no financial interest and no commitment either.  If enough folk said yes, (100+ houses) then Digital Scotland would find a solution to the obstacles with the approved supplier of their choice.

There will be a meeting later on in November (16th – 7pm at the Walls Regatta Club) which the Stakeholder Director, Broadband Delivery, Digital Directorate, Scottish Government will be attending to answer questions from us.

I cannot tell you just how much I want this to go ahead.  It could make such a huge change to the infrastructure.  Satellite and Mobile broadband are all well and good, but the more folk sign up to them (if nothing happens), then in turn the signals will become weaker (ie slower) as they become more diluted with users and everyone will be back to square one again.

So, we spent the afternoon with me driving and OH nipping out to talk to residents and/or drop leaflets through their doors.  And while he did the work, I took photos of my beautiful surroundings.