An innovative South Norfolk community venue is celebrating the first anniversary of the installation of state-of-the art broadband on its premises.

Visitors to Morley Village and Sports Hall can now access twenty-first century standard fast broadband courtesy of ThinkingWISP.

“The ThinkingWISP installation is a major step forward for our venue” said Corinna Pharaoh, Chair for Morley Village and Sports Hall. “Having broadband will enable us to attract more customers and a more varied group of people looking to hire us because we have wi-fi. Not a lot of halls or spaces like ours have it. We hope to attract business who will be able to hire the venue for workshops and sales presentations, which require good internet access. A building of this size has quite a lot of running costs so the more clients we can attract, the better. Many of them need internet access to support the activities they are doing and will ask if there is wi-fi access before booking.”

Morley Village and Sports Hall already offers a wide range of recreational facilities, including a 12-line climbing wall managed by South Norfolk Climbing Club, that has proved popular with the local and surrounding communities, and a main hall that can accommodate up to 250 people.

Many businesses and households across Norfolk are in urgent need of acceptably fast broadband speeds, and community venues are increasingly finding that users of their facilities require a good signal for their mobile devices. It’s especially a problem for rural areas because whilst, in England as a whole, 17% of the population lives in rural areas, in Norfolk it’s 53%.

“Although great progress has been made by public services in extending broadband provision across Norfolk, there are still some 10 per-cent of areas that can’t receive a signal” explained CAN Chief Executive Jon Clemo.

“ThinkingWISP is twenty-first century technology – it does away with the need for cables. Usually, the final connection between your property and the network relies on very old technology, designed for ‘phone calls and not much else but ThinkingWISP uses radio waves, which means the signal doesn’t degrade.”

Steve Temple, Managing Director of InTouch, explained the technical side of ThinkingWISP “We transmit our broadband signal via our masts sited all across the region, beaming the signal to our customers’ homes and business premises. All we need is line-of-sight between the mast and an aerial receiver. You don’t even need a land-line connection in many cases.”

Councillor Michael Edney, deputy leader of South Norfolk Council said: “A decent broadband service is essential in nearly every aspect of our modern lives and today nearly 70% of the contact we have with our residents is online. We understand the frustration that some of our businesses and homeowners feel about the speed of their broadband connections and that’s why we’re determined to be the first rural district in the region to offer 100% super-fast broadband coverage.”