Scenario
Cean a Bhaigh is the Scottish Gaelic name (Kennavey in English) of a hamlet of a few houses on the island of Sgalpaigh (English – Scalpay). It can be found at these co-ordinates:
OS X (Eastings) 123100
OS Y (Northings) 894854
Nearest Post Code HS4 3YG
Lat (WGS84) N57:51:26 (57.857087)
Long (WGS84) W6:40:11 (-6.669689)
The main mapping web sites will show you where this is:
http://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=123100&y=894854&z=120&sv=123100,894854&st=4&ar=y&mapp=map.srf&searchp=ids.srf&dn=594&ax=123100&ay=894854&lm=0
and by typing Kennavay into Google Maps (maps.google.co.uk).
Zooming out on these maps will show you that this is a remote location off the east coast of the Isle of Harris. Harris is itself a remote island off the west coast of Scotland.
I am (at least in my dreams) about to move to the very end house that you get to by driving through Kennavey, past Scalpay Linen and carrying straight on until you get to the end of the road. Look at Google maps streetview to see what this house and this location looks like. The arrow on the streetmap.co.uk link above points directly to this house.
Currently I live in a suburban area on the edge of Liverpool and I am used to having a high speed (35Mbps downstream) Internet connection. I am therefore interested to know what options are available for me to connect my new house to the Internet.
For the purposes of this assignment, assume that I have been using the Internet for a number of years and am familiar with terms like ADSL as being the way I get my connection but do not really understand what they mean, how they work and particularly what the limitations are. Therefore, I am asking you, as a network expert, what I should do.
Requirements
Your assignment is to explain how to provide an Internet connection to this location.
You should produce a formal report that outlines a range of suitable connection technologies that could be used for this location. You MUST focus on this location. Consider the problems that this location presents and how the technologies resolve those problems. You should research the connection technologies that are currently
Page 4 of 7
available to this location using the various web sites that provide such information. You should also consider technologies that may become available in the near future (but may require some investment) and also novel connection technologies that are not commonly used but may be appropriate for this location, including ones that are currently only at the research phase. You need to make recommendations for this location and clearly justify these recommendations.
You need to cover the entire backhaul connection route from the premises to a major Internet backbone. It is not sufficient to discuss the connection to the local telephone exchange. It is up to you to find where there are such Internet backbone links that you could connect to.
You do not need to discuss local distribution of the Internet connection at the premises. i.e. do not discuss LAN technologies.