Scilly Isles get 80 Meg broadband from abandoned subsea cable

If you want your community to be super-connected your best bet is to be super-unconnected with lots of disadvantage to make up for. So it is with the islands of Scilly: specks of rock and sand a comfortable 28 miles (not too close) from the tip of Cornwall whose residents have just taken receipt of a fibre-based, super-fast broadband network. It's all part of a  £132 million project funded by the EU, BT and Superfast Cornwall. 

The first customers on the island are already using the net which delivers up to 80 Meg per customer making the Scillies probably the world's best connected little islands. 

The whole thing appears to have been made possible by the existence of an abandoned sub-sea cable running from Cornwall to Spain. A major project lifted and relaid the cable to take in the islands and in a single bound the Scilly Isles and its 2,200 residents have gone from being practically unplugged to being a broadband nirvana.