The summer is always a difficult time for our network.
The reason is that the number of houses using Tiree Broadband increases massively with the increase in visitors.
We use a bunch of standard domestic fibre to the cabinet telephone lines to provide the service. We feed it into a system which balances them out. We then assign your property to a line. It’s a random allocation.
Everyone can get up to 10Mb per second. But we don’t have enough bandwidth to guarantee that everyone on a line will get that at the same time.
So, sometimes, we get a situation where a lot of people on the same line are all using a LOT of internet. And the line just maxes out.
The other thing to know is that 10Mb is not a lot these days! TV streaming is the single biggest user of bandwidth in your house. Gaming would be second.
If you have 4 people trying to watch Netflix in house, your 10Mb every second will be used in no time at all. Then the circle of doom appears on your screen as it waits.
If your line is maxed out because of other people’s usage AND your house is trying to use a lot of internet at once, then your experience will be poor. We know this and it frustrates us almost as much as it frustrates you.
What can we do?
We know that the fibre to the cabinet lines that we currently use are only just enough to provide an adequate service and they sometimes get overwhelmed by the volume of traffic going through them.
We keep trying to push BT to give us full fibre to the premises connections to either An Iodhlann or the Trust Office. These are much faster and would improve the situation. With fibre to the premises all of our internet traffic would go through one big connection and this would eliminate the problem of particular lines maxing out.
Fibre should be available to us when the R100 rollout arrives. And it should also be available for most of you through the usual providers.
So, ideally, we won’t be needed as much after that point.
The problem is that we cannot get a firm date for when Openreach will be in Tiree to put in the fibre. So, we are caught between a rock and a hard place. We are doing our best to keep the service running until then.
In the meantime, if a property changes hands, we are not renewing the Broadband contract with a new owner unless:
The are going to live her permanently AND they cannot get a service through their phoneline. Even then, we are strongly encouraging people to look at 4g or Starlink (if they can afford it) as an option.
What can you do?
Don’t leave internet TVs on in the background!
Pause TV and any type of streaming (like Netflix, Amazon TV, Apple TV, Sky Q) if you are struggling to use email, etc.
Find the person in the house who is Netflixing on their tablet and ask them to go outside and get some fresh air for 10 minutes!
Tell us if it is particularly bad. It might be possible for us to move you onto a different line. We can’t check things if we don’t know about them!
And do look at other options. We will not be offended. We want you to get the best internet you can, and if that means leaving Tiree Broadband, we fully support your decision!
