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Cornwall gets its own rural wireless broadband around Penzance, Taunton

It's rural broadband, but a half-way house between business and consumer, judging by the pricing: a new provider has set up in Britain's furthest West peninsula, in Cornwall - in Penzance. It's got a WiFi network of its own.

What makes Tellnet different from many, is that it's connected to a very fast backbone. According to marketing boss Sim Stuart, Tellnet is part of a West Country ISP - Evergreen Internet - which sits on top of a major fibre backbone. "And we have access to some very tall masts, so we can provide connection to people up to 10 miles away from our access points."

Tellnet is rolling out a £65 per month subscription broadband. Installation cost is £250 which includes a site survey to make sure customers have access to a useable signal.

"We've also taken out a licence to provide 5.4GHz services on 802.11a," said Stuart. Technically, until 802.11h is fully approved, although nobody is likely to take you to court for using 802.11a, it remains unavailable for commercial exploitation without a licence.

"We provide a range of services; starting at £65 a month for half a meg of broadband. It's a commercial service, which we think competes nicely with BT's equivalent ADSL service. Contention ratios are lower; we do at twenty to one."

The company has already installed infrastructure on commercial telecoms mast locations at Caradon Hill, Carnmenellis and Taunton in addition to its own data centre home in the heart of Penzance. That is at Westloc Suite - a co-location data centre with high-speed connectivity.