By William Coleman
There is nothing worse than doing a Broadband speed check on your area to find that the speeds available are so low it would take about a year to open a webpage. Well that has all changed for hundreds of households across south Cumbria thanks to a local holiday park group.
Silverdale park near Arnisde were switch on to ultra fast fibre broadband earlier this month. After digging up over five miles of trenches and road sides snail mail is now a thing of the past for this area.
All this hard work and effort enables the community-led broadband provider B4RN to install junction chamber along the five mile route read for connection to the surrounding properties. This meant that instead of struggling with poor speeds, sometimes less than 1MB, local home could now travel at lightspeed around the web with a monumental 1000 megabits.
On top of that amazing speeds residents are receiving it seems they are also saving money and getting a lot more bang for their buck. The speeds they are getting are much higher than what the most efficient BT line can provide, at a fraction of the cost too.
The Holgates group, owners of Silverdale park, recently completed a similar project at its nearby Silver Ridge park, putting many other householders within reach of supersonic broadband.
Parks owner Michael Holgate said the much greater speed will make a vast improvement to the efficiency of his business – and will be welcomed by holiday guests:
“Like many rural businesses in Cumbria, we rely on the internet to generate sales, communicate with customers, and keep our website up to date,” he said.
“Before, our online computers often managed little better than a glacial crawl – but now we’re really in the fast lane, and get better connectivity than many people in major towns and cities.
“Customers are also delighted, and now they can access amazing download speeds, and use social media to send pictures and even videos of their holiday.
“Digging the ducts for the fibre cables was a mammoth and costly task for us, but we’re thrilled that it could now prove a digital lifeline for many locally-living families,” said Michael.
2016 saw the 60th anniversary of the family owned business and today has six holiday parks in the region which creates around 150 job.
There is more information about Holgates parks at www.holgates.co.uk
