One such site is Meeth Quarry. This was formerly a 150 hectare clayworks operated by Imerys, and located near Hatherleigh. Having purchased the site in 2012, the Trust has been working hard to restore and enhance the diversity of different habitats present.
Meeth Quarry has a wonderful landscape that is recovering well from quarrying operations. There are large expanses of open water, wet grassland, stone quarry face and woodland. There are 18 species of national importance at the site including barn owls and otters making it a fantastic wildlife-watching destination.
The Trust continues to use the former quarry site office for the management of the reserve. Being in an very rural area, the reserve suffers from poor connectivity to the outside world. There was only a single analogue phone line present. The line length was so long that it would only yield 2Mbit/sec throughput over broadband. And this is on a good day! To watch Netflix in just standard definition, you need at least 3Mbit/sec. So 2Mbit/sec in a business environment is not acceptable.
Water ingress and abrasion from tree branches to the wires, further degraded the line quality. This made the broadband and the phone line drop out often. Cellular signal at site with mobile phones is also poor. This presented a huge issue for the Trust – external communications were impossible if the analogue line went down.
Our solution was to replace the broadband line with a 4G connection, and a high-gain directional antenna. We visited the site and surveyed to find the best network to use. We then installed an unobtrusive 4G system, using alignment tools to point it directly towards the antenna.
The site now sees speeds of over 20Mbit/sec. This is a tenfold increase in performance, and far faster than can be achieved with just a mobile phone, or a portable hotspot device. The results show the benefits of correct equipment and antenna selection. Users at Meeth can now connect reliably back to head office, and work uninterrupted.
The Trust had published the existing Meeth phone number in many places. They did not want to lose this number, or for it to change. We had recently installed a VoIP (Voice over IP) phone system for the Trust, serving many remote sites. This gives excellent economies of scale, and it made sense to add further to it. So we ported the existing Meeth phone number into this VoIP system and placed a remote telephone extension at the Meeth site. The site now retains the same telephone number, but carried over VoIP rather than an analogue line. The VoIP works perfectly over the 4G connection, and is now immune to the issues encountered by analogue lines in rural locations.
Note: BT Openreach has stated that they aim to upgrade the UK telephone network to digital voice services by 2025. This will mean that WLR (wholesale line rental) based services will not be available. This includes products such as analogue, ISDN 2, ISDN 30, LLU SMPF, SLU SMPF, Narrowband Line Share and Classic products.
Openreach will replace the analogue line with SOTAP (Single order transitional access product). Products such as FTTC (Fibre to the cabinet) and FTTP (Fibre to the cabinet) will continue to be available. These will all support broadband, and hence telephony using VoIP. But, these will still be carried over physical lines, and will still be subject to abrasion damage on long, overground rural lines. It is clear that connections over 4G (and eventually 5G) will continue to be extremely useful in rural areas.
