Pete Bevington

27 July, 2007

FOR such a momentous occasion it was a very understated affair. Shetland and Orkney's communications revolution involved little more than a 28mm diameter cable being dragged ashore on a sandy beach by a mini digger.

It must have been one of the most light hearted invasions of all time. A dry suited Faroese diver unhooked pink buoys from the cable and hurled them ashore while his colleagues hooted with laughter as they booted the bouncy balls into a pile on the beach.

There were no cheers, no champagne, just a few satisfied smiles on the faces of the few men who have been working quietly behind the scenes to bring it about.

Around 10 years ago Shetland first tried to join the modern world of high speed telecommunications by pushing for a fibre optic cable to connect the isles with mainland Scotland and the North Sea oil rigs.

Shetland Charitable Trust and Scottish & Southern Energy joined up on a £12 million project not dissimilar to what Viking Energy are up to at the moment with their mega wind farm.

Between 1998 and 2002 there were detailed discussions between UK, Faroese and Icelandic telecom firms, North Sea oil companies and mobile phone operators.

A deal was on the verge of being struck in 2002 involving SSE Telecom, BT, BP and Shell, but collapsed with all the blame being privately heaped on BT for being "unco-operative". Faroe and Iceland went elsewhere, eventually landing the FARICE cable at Dunnett Head in 2003.

Two years later interest in the Shetland cable suddenly revived and requests poured in for information stored in the £1.4 million seabed survey carried out by Shetland Charitable Trust for the initial venture.

Last year the data was handed over to the Faroese telecom provider Føroya Tele, who wanted a reliable alternative to the FARICE cable in case it snapped. They were concerned that the existing CANTAT link from Canada was reaching the end of its useful life after 12 years on the ocean floor.

This week the Faroese were true to their word - ironically the same month Smyril unceremoniously dumped Shetland from its schedule - landing the yellow and black cable on Maywick beach from where it will be fed 390 kilometres across the North Atlantic to Tórshavn.

After the bonxies have finished nesting in September, a landline will connect a sub station at Maywick to Sandwick on Shetland's east coast, from where it will travel into the Aire of Cara, on Orkney's mainland, out of nearby Manse Bay and on to Boydie Bay, at Banff.

So what does it mean for Shetland? Just having a state of the art cable laying across our isles does not suddenly give us all the ability to download the whole of the Lord of the Rings cinematic trilogy in a couple of minutes, it seems.

"The next stage is to get a telco (telcoms company) to break into the cable and make use of it to allow us to get high speed data links," explained Alistair Cooper, one time development chief at the SIC, and now a Shetland North councillor.

Cooper thinks current talks with BT will bear fruit, but it will be up to Shetland to keep the pressure on to get anything done by summer 2008, and support from the local business community would be welcome, he said.

What Shetland is really after is a "point of presence", a physical building that houses all the electronic equipment such as servers and routers to provide an access point for internet service providers to use the cable.

How that will come about will no doubt be the subject of talks between the council and BT over the coming weeks and months.

But BT are not the only potential operator who could step in. Føroya Tele is already expanding its operations into Denmark and will be keen to get as much business for their £16 million investment in the SHEFAR cable as possible.

The Faroese also have a great interest in the welfare of their southern neighbours. Islanders feel embarrassed about the recent treatment Shetland has received at the hands of Smyril Line. Ironically FT's chief executive Andras Róin for the past 11 years has just moved to become CEO of Smyril.

Føroya Tele's project manager for the SHEFAR link, Janus Djurhuus, raised his eyebrows enthusiastically at the prospect of his company stepping in to Shetland's telecommunications market.

He explained that unlike BT, state-owned FT has a constitutional commitment to provide top quality phone connections to every islander. That means that islands with just five inhabitants still have a broadband connection. "We have 97 per cent coverage," he said.

Djurhuus was astonished to hear that broadband only came to Shetland's rural communities after the Scottish Executive stepped in with a subsidy, and stressed that the company's £16 million investment in SHEFAR involved no public finance whatsoever.

SHEFAR gives Faroe reliability. If FARICE goes down, they have an alternative connection, strengthened even further through the ring circuit it joins near Banff.

It could provide the same reliability for Shetland phone and internet users, who currently suffer downtime when the microwave link falters in bad weather. What's more, with phone usage increasing exponentially as the internet becomes more and more part of everyone's life, this radio link will probably reach capacity before the end of this decade, making the fibre optic cable as important for BT as it is for FT.

"This could be of great value to Shetland because you won't need your radio link any more, but how you use it will be up to you guys I think," Djurhuus said.

Marvin Smith is the council's telecommunications development manager. He has no doubt about the value this cable represents, if it can be harnessed.

"For the first time we'll have high bandwidth that's reliable. It will provide Shetland with the potential for communications as good as anywhere in the world and we hope that will help to attract people to live here.

"It's certainly going to be of vital importance to our bairns. Our whole way of living is going to be based around telecommunications.

"Having a cable is going to be as important as having water, electricity and a phone; it's going to be a vital part of life."

But for Ian Brown, of internet service provider Shetland Broadband, the benefits of big broadband are not going to be felt all across the isles.

"The potential is great. We could have data centres based here, green call centres powered by windmills. Why ship our wind power to the mainland when we can use it here?

"But what we really need in Shetland is for the remoter areas to be able to get higher speeds, and not just if they are right next door to the exchange."

Brown said he tried to connect broadband to a property in Eshaness this week, but it was too far from the Hillswick exchange to get any kind of link at all.

"People quite often will phone up and say I'm trying to get broadband, can you do it? We look at it and say we can't, you're too far from the telephone exchange."

The answer, he says, is investing more money. And that means government money, because BT are reluctant to upgrade exchanges in small communities where there is little return, not having the same constitutional commitment laid on FT in Faroe.

"If you consider that 50 years ago when electricity was being put in the view was taken that people living in remoter areas should be brought into the modern age. Government put in large sums of money for infrastructure so people could be connected to the electricity system. I think the same thing should be done with this.

"The Scottish Executive say they are spending money on it, but either they are not spending enough or they don't understand the extent of the problem."

Now the immediate future of the cable is in the hands of Scott Weese and his team from Canadian firm International Telecom on board cable laying vessel IT Intrepid.

They are laying 390kms of the best quality fibre optic cable anywhere in the world across the continental shelf to Faroe, with a couple of branches off to the BP platforms at Schiehallion and Clair.

The ship has a plough which "trenches" it one metre down into the seabed to avoid it being damaged by passing trawlers. "The challenge will be getting it buried into areas that have some rock. Apart from that it's only the weather at this time of year in the North Atlantic that we should have to worry about," Weese said.