Superfast promises and grains of sand

VOICES on a phone, images on a screen, financial transactions and documents all turn into little pieces of data called bytes. In the world of IT communications those little bytes travel along copper or (glass) fibre cables. Imagine the bytes are grains of sand and the cable is a hose. With a wider hose more grains can flow and at a faster rate. Kinks and joints in the hose will slow the grains of data down.

A kilobyte is 1000 bytes per second. A Megabyte is 1000 kilobytes per second. BT and other providers offer services up to 80 mbps but typically maybe 20mbps. But with the kinks and joints in the hoses around the west of Scotland you might be only getting a few megabytes per second.

The prime minister recently pledged that every (qualified as 95 percent) household would have access to ‘superfast’ broadband by 2017.

Superfast is defined by Ofcom as a download speed of more than 30mbps. You can search the internet and find speed checkers which will tell you what speed you can achieve for downloads.

Modern business increasingly revolves around the ability to communicate and share information. A document might be several megabytes in size and high definition photos might be double that. Once you get to streaming TV you are transferring vast quantities of data. Superfast enables this process and in particular allows us to use cloud-based services to process and store substantial amounts of data. Rock on 2017!