We’ve very quickly gone from no 5G to numerous 5G projects getting off the ground, with the latest of these being a plan from Quickline (a wireless broadband company) to bring 5G broadband to caravan parks in Ingoldmells in Lincolnshire, including Butlins.
As part of the 5G Rural Integrated Testbed consortium (5GRIT), Quickline has developed and is now working on rolling out this new 5G infrastructure.
In conversation with HU17, Alasdair MacLeod, the Quickline developer who designed the framework, did a good a job of explaining it, saying:
“We are putting in a brand-new hardware infrastructure, which is totally unique, using 5G technology from IgniteNet coupled with other technologies like Ubiquiti, which will provide an innovative wireless product for people to access.
“We’ve already positioned telegraph poles across Ingoldmells in a grid structure and we are now preparing to install the electrical cabinets. Then once our technology is switched on and all the boxes (or distribution cabinets) are talking to each other, you need to imagine a net covering the entire area – and it’s that net cast between the poles that will allow superfast broadband to reach the caravan sites and allow multiple devices to be used in the same location without interference.”
The project, funded by the £2.1 million investment the UK government has made in the 5GRIT, will begin connectivity testing in late July, with Lancaster University (another member of the 5GRIT) set to monitor the grid infrastructure and its performance.
Home entertainment on holiday
If all goes well, this 5G broadband should then start to be made available to customers, which should mean people on holiday in the covered caravan parks will be able to make full use of their tech, including using Netflix and playing console games online.
Exactly how fast this 5G broadband will get is unclear, but it sounds like it will be in the region of 30-50Mbps, which is likely a lot faster than what these caravan parks offer now, but not in the realms of the 150Mbps – 1Gbps+ speeds that 5G can potentially deliver.
Still, it’s nice to see that along with the likes of EE and Vodafone bringing 5G to big cities, the tech is already being used to some extent in more rural locations.
