There can be little doubt that among the contenders for the single biggest invention since the wheel itself is the World Wide Web and the medium through which we surf its seemingly infinitesimal and varied corridors, the Internet.

Whether you are a traditional sign-writer in the Outer Hebrides or a multinational exporter and manufacturer of signage systems in London, there is one common denominator that will connect you, the need for a connection to the digital highway to run your business—preferably a fast one.

So, it is with interest that the seaside town of Bournemouth is the site of a test that could make our little island the envy of Europe if not the world.

CityFibre, a small telecoms operator, has begun rolling out optical fibres that allow for broadband that is 70 gobsmackingly times faster than the national average—upwards of one gigabit per second.

In a script that would be worthy of a Montepython script, this means that Bournemouth is achieving speeds that citizens of digital wizz-kids in the most developed cities in the world from New York to Seoul would kill for.

Can you imagine how beneficial it would be to your average sign-maker or wide-format print specialist if they knew that those huge vector image files being sent over from any number of clients each day could be sent over or shared in a time that measured just fractions of a second? And for those with e-commerce sites, both national or international, what these types of speeds could make possible? This is not forgetting the myriad of opportunities that could be opened up in terms of instantly providing clients with the ability to see their commission via 3D visualisations shared via cloud-based software straight from your CADCAM software.

Plucked from my mental hat these benefits are just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, there is a but. CityFibre and another key player Hyperoptic are among the very few companies pioneering in this field and it could be 15 years before such speeds become even near standard. The sticking point is that moving over to this type of fibre for national players such as BT is a massive infrastructure project, and our cash-strapped Government just cannot muster the funds. Additionally, players like BT have little stimulus from demand right now, with the Broadband Stakeholder Group only predicting the average householder will only want 19 megabits per second by 2023. Still, with plucky players like CityFibre biting at their heels, perhaps BT will move sooner rather than later to roll out broadband Nirvana.
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