Yes this article is all about Broadband speeds. Not perhaps an immediately obvious subject for wildlife and nature photographers to be blogging about. But if you want to be a wildlife photographer or for that matter any type of photographer, these days your life is pretty much ruled by Broadband speed.
*Sigh* we remember the good old days, when all you needed was a local post office and a postman. Drop rolls of film in the post and a few days later “Mr Kodak” delivered them back as beautiful pictures. You sent people a letter or if really urgent, perhaps a telephone call.
We are settling into the highlands of Scotland, after relocating from southeast England [link to blog post]. Our new home is also our place of work, well at least the admin bit of our work. I am sure that a lot of people when choosing a new home might worry about the look of the house, bedroom numbers even local amenities. Not us, we saw an advert online and before even looking at the wallpaper, we were on the internet checking Broadband speed.
Sometimes; when we tell people this, I am sure they think we are addicted to watching box sets. Not true. Technology; was one of our biggest considerations and challenges, as we tried to relocate. What seemed easy when we started, a rural location with high-speed internet connectivity, ended up being all but impossible.
A typical house search went something like this.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m just watching episode 4”
“I’ve found a house that might be suitable.”
“Whereabouts?”
“About a mile or so outside a nice village.”
“What’s the Broadband speed and the wallpaper like?”
“I’m just looking up the Broadband speed. It’s oh, 0.45Mb”
“How can I say this, a carrier pigeon would be faster, personally I think we need to keep looking.”
And so it went on week after week, month after month. We even looked at other possibilities, pigeon lofts or satellite Broadband. It’s a good option if you don’t mind paying a fortune. As we found out, if you want a rural location trying to get any sort of Broadband connection over 1Mb is very difficult.
In today’s world a connection speed of 1Mb is a joke. But that’s the sort of speed you will be looking at in many rural locations. One more little thing is that this speed is the advertised speed. In normal speak, your Broadband provider won’t guarantee this speed. If someone else is using the same bit of wire and uses the internet, yours and their speed will go much lower.
Being simple folk we have simple needs from our Broadband. We would like to be able to upload a very big file that, our very expensive camera took, to someone who would like to use it. Ok and maybe the odd box set but only the odd one. Rural broadband speed is the biggest single problem with running a business in our countryside today. Never mind 2Mb if we want our rural communities to stay in the countryside and look after it for us, we need to be providing fast Broadband to everyone not just to a few people in towns and cities who live next to broadband cabinet.
If you are in the same situation as we are, you need quick Broadband for your business. Don’t despair. Very slowly, faster is getting there. Now I wouldn’t hold your breath if you are in a really rural location. But as we have managed to find, admittedly after much searching, we have a home that will allow us to live and work in our countryside.
Read about why we have moved to rural Scotland
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