Being a Nottingham lad I don't very often extol the virtues of another county but...
Lincolnshire is a fab county to live in - great schools, low crime rate, reasonable house prices etc. and of course we have the
Lincolnshire Riviera of
Skegness (see image on right),
Mablethorpe and
Anderby Creek.
The downside is that the county has had a reputation of being a provincial backwater unlike say
Nottinghamshire who are seen as a regional leader. However the big chiefs in
Lincolnshire are getting their act together in terms of IT and the
internet and have realised that broadband is crucial for rural businesses in
Lincolnshire.
We are in the process of obtaining advanced broadband with a low contention ratio. Allow me to explain..
Think of broadband as a pipe delivering to your house. At the moment what comes down the pipe is a lot slower than what you can send up the pipe. This makes downloading quick but sending information slower. Advanced broadband has the same speed up and down. It comes from a signal rather than a phone line and the maximum number of people you can share the signal with is 10. The number of people that share broadband is called the contention ratio. The less people the better the speed.
Because the speed is so fast it can handle phone calls as well as normal stuff like email. This is called
VOIP or voice over
internet protocol. My personal slant is that
VOIP is coming but we aren't quite ready yet.
