Dear Philip
Thanks for following up on my Twitter comment.
As you’re aware, if the Island wishes to attract high quality businesses in almost any sector, but especially in technology then good connectivity is essential.
Over dinner last night with some local friends, I learned of one business that chose not to relocate to Jersey (with the loss of around 10 potential jobs created) because when they investigated Jersey’s services the feedback they received from local firms was, essentially, that most things were a rip-off and connectivity was terrible.
I have to say I agree.
I’m in the office in Queen Street using our JT Broadband. I spent 20 minutes in a hold queue to their Business Support team in order to find out the details of our contract. We pay £80/month for ‘Business Pro’ and for that we get ~20MB downstream with max 20:1 contention. In reality, as I write this we have 0.75MB upstream which is pretty pathetic. According to this report, there are cities in Romania that manage download speeds of over 100MB. In London, according to this report from Ookla, Virgin Media offers speeds of 136MB down / 44MB up: 50x faster uploads than Jersey! Even when JT manages to deploy fibre to our office, the best we can hope for is 50MB down / 5MB up.
At home in Corbiere, I have Newtel and the bandwidth is diabolical: typically 1MB down and less than 0.10MB up. That’s barely even describable as broadband. Yet today many people work from home and so it’s essential to provide higher-quality connectivity.
You probably saw my article on my experience with Sure and my mobile phone: over £6,000 of data roaming charges (charges that were already at least 10x what most UK providers would have levied) were eventually reversed when I demonstrated that the SIM was not correctly recognizing my physical location. Furthermore, when I’m in Jersey the 4G is poor and spotty.
This is not a package that looks attractive to technology businesses.
I look forward to your comments.
Rus