UK’s first wireless gigabit broadband comes to Edinburgh
He has struggled with poor broadband at home with big-name internet service providers unwilling or unable to provide fibre to his flat in Edinburgh city centre.
“The quality was abysmal,” Kashif said. “The maximum download speed was 8mpbs and upload was 2mbps but most of the time I struggled to even get 5mbps. I would often freeze on Zoom calls with my team, which was somewhat embarrassing, especially when on calls to clients.”
Kashif’s experience sadly is not unique in Edinburgh: latest Ofcom data from the Connected Nations 2021 report shows 7,447 premises unable to get 30mbps broadband – considered to be the minimum viable speed for video conferencing. This makes it difficult or impossible for thousands of people to work or study from home, access basic online services such as healthcare, manage their money online, entertain themselves or keep in touch with friends and relatives.
Edinburgh is UK’s “outage capital”
A survey by price comparison website Uswitch last summer named Edinburgh as the UK’s “outage capital”, with its residents suffering the longest time without broadband per person, losing nine million hours of broadband over the year. And estate agency Knight Frank this year warned the city was lagging behind other major UK cities in digital connectivity as measured by fibre availability, capacity and performance, mobile network capabilities and closeness to data centre services.
UK’s first wireless gigabit broadband comes to city
In response to these challenges, WeLink Communications UK has launched Britain’s first wireless gigabit broadband service in Edinburgh, bringing lightning-fast internet speeds to the Old and New Towns without the need to dig up streets in the World Heritage Site.
WeLink are inviting households and businesses to get in touch to learn about their range of introductory offers. WeLink is pioneering a fixed-wireless mmWave broadband approach that is much quicker and less expensive to deploy than traditional fibre-to-the-premises broadband. It extends the reach of fibre into an area using the latest advances in wireless mesh technologies and network routing to deliver gigabit speeds for homes and businesses while avoiding the needless delay and disruption of laying fibre-optic cables underground.
‘It’s been a complete game changer’
Kashif is one of the early adopters. He said: “WeLink has honestly been revolutionary, especially with having to work from home. I’ve not had a single frozen Zoom call and the symmetrical download and upload speeds have blown my wildest expectations. Upload speed is insane – it’s like going from driving a Ford Fiesta to a Formula 1 racing car!
“If we hadn’t discovered WeLink, we would still be at the mercy of the traditional broadband companies. But I’m extremely grateful that WeLink’s cutting-edge technology has finally arrived in Edinburgh. I wholeheartedly recommend WeLink to everyone in the area. It’s been a complete game changer for me and I promise you this, once you try WeLink, you will not want to go back to traditional internet via the telephone socket ever again.”
See if you can connect
Natalie Duffield, CEO of WeLink Communications UK said: “We are proud to be investing in Edinburgh and are committed to the city. As CEO of our predecessor company IntechnologyWiFi, I rolled out EdiFreeWiFi, one of the biggest deployments of free public Wi-Fi in the UK which has attracted more than 1.15m registered users to date. We understand the local landscape and the massive market opportunity for supplying the kind of lightning-fast connectivity that households and businesses can depend on in this day and age, initially within EH1, EH2 and EH3 but rapidly expanding across the wider city soon.”
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