24 Sep 2010
Holiday WiFi gets a boost at Beach House
OK, let’s just admit that having access to broadband on holiday can be a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand it’s great to be able to do work whilst cut off from the rest of civilisation and the usual distractions of everyday life. But, at the same time, if you’ve come to Mull to get away from it all, do you really want your email nagging for your attention or all your twittering colleagues and friends tweeting you from afar?Yet there’s little doubting that it’s very convenient to have ready access to a WiFi connection whether for your mobile phone or your laptop. So many of the things we take for granted these days just do not operate without some way of tapping into the internet.Very fortunately we’ve had broadband at Beach House for four years now. We’ve just got around to upgrading the router so that visitors can now enjoy a much stronger WiFi connection, thanks to BT’s Home Hub. This offers the older wireless G link or, for newer devices it can connect at the much faster wireless N standard.Just don’t assume that faster WiFi makes the web faster too. Whilst we’re delighted we have broadband out here, it’s pretty slow by modern standards, at just a half meg. Though, for a bit of web surfing and email, you’ll really never notice.RalphTwitter: mullescape
Actually as I think of it, I can’t understand why we’re still restricted to a half meg connection after four years? It’s high time that BT upgraded the local exchange to fall in line with the rest of Scotland and the UK at large. Really ought to be at least ‘up to 8MB’ line speed.
Ralph
Twitter: mullescape
ralph
September 24th, 2010 at 10:52 pmpermalink
If you are providing such a great facility to your users then why you restricted to a half mega connection?
Cottage Scotland
September 30th, 2010 at 1:25 pmpermalink
Hmm
I’m guessing you’re not clued in as to how broadband was supplied to low density parts of rural Scotland. Our local exchange was upgraded to broadband by a subsidy from the Scottish Government as we simply didn’t have enough connecting properties for BT alone to justify upgrading our local exchange.
The downside is that we only got what was, even at that time, a very base level of broadband connectivity.
And that’s the point. The half meg connection speed is perfectly ok for most stuff, but it wouldn’t cut it for, say, using the BBC iPlayer.
Mind you, I don’t imagine that’s high on anyone’s list when considering a self-catering holiday spot to stay at whilst visiting the Isle of Mull.
Cheers
Ralph
ralph
September 30th, 2010 at 2:01 pmpermalink