BT has announced an ambitious scheme to bring superfast broadband to the Isles of Scilly off the south west coast of England.
The £3.7m project will see BT reuse the fibre-optic cable, that has been resting dormant on the seabed of the Atlantic ocean, and will divert it to the five inhabited islands, which have approximately 2,200 residents.
The residents currently get online through a radio signal sent from Land's End, 28 miles away, but that will come to an end when the project bares fruit in 2014, after a ship has cut and moved the cables to their new home.
And if, like us, you're wondering what fibre-optic cable was been doing resting at the bottom of the ocean in the first place, it had previously been used to assist communications between the UK, Ireland and Spain.
Ambitious
The project is part of BT's £132m Superfast Cornwall project, which aims to bring the company's fastest speeds to one of the UK's most beautiful, yet hardest to reach areas.
The communications giant, which has been at the centre of the government's drive to bring faster speeds to rural areas, said the scheme was "the most ambitious UK project ever undertaken to bring fastest broadband speeds to a remote community"
Ranulf Scarbrough, Superfast Cornwall programme director for BT said: "The remote location of the Isles of Scilly, their wonderful maritime heritage and scientific and environmental status will present a variety of unique engineering challenges. Environmentally, it is excellent news that we are able to breathe new life into existing cables which are no longer used, but still in very good condition."
So, if you ever feel like ditching the metropolis for a remote sunny island away from the hustle and bustle, pretty soon you'll be able to rely on the joys superfast internet to assist the transition.
Via Telegraph
