HUNGARY: Small Hungarian town proud of what may be Central Europe's fastest internet connection

Record ID: 738131

  • Title: HUNGARY: Small Hungarian town proud of what may be Central Europe's fastest internet connection
  • Date: 29th October 2007
  • Summary: VILLAGE RESIDENT RIDING BICYCLE HOUSE WITH WINDOWBOX FLOWERS
  • Embargoed: 13th November 2007 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Hungary
  • Country: Hungary
  • Topics: Communications,Science / Technology
  • Reuters ID: LVA8H1NCM8FDTD8S5T3XKTB7E7AB
  • Story Text: While it may look like any other small Hungarian town, the village of Boly is leading the way in its use of the internet. And Boly pensioners are embracing the technology which allows them to communicate with the world.
    At first glance, the village of Boly looks like any other peaceful Hungarian small town. Behind its quiet, orderly streets, however, a high-tech internet revolution is taking place.
    Most of the 3,800 residents are wired up to the Internet and connected to each other via fibre optic cables. The 450 households share a service which provides an average speed of 10-20 Mbps per connection. This means that Boly residents have what they believe is the fastest internet connection in Hungary and possibly one of the fastest in Europe.
    The server centre is in a small building behind the mayor's office where three local computer wizards work on the system.
    "One organiser unit like this collects the users in one street; one optic cable means one household. These optic cables are organised by one optic switch. Two optic switches are linked so we connect 48 optic cables with a traditional Ethernet computer connection," IT technician, Arpad Rozsahegyi said.
    The reason the town became so hooked on technology lies in its multi-lingual background. Boly has had a strong German-speaking minority and thus when foreign channels first appeared in Hungary after the fall of communism, people were very keen to access German television channels. Boly adopted cable TV in 1989 but with a third of households hooking up to broadband via cable, the net ground to a halt. In 17 years the cable technology had become totally obsolete and the town decided to jump ahead in technology It switched to a fibre optic cable system, turning Boly into one large LAN party.
    This enabled internet users connected to the town network to access data, including films and music on each others' computers as if they were using their own hard discs.
    Residents say the new system is much faster than it used to be.
    "You cannot even compare it with the old system, this one is incredibly faster than the old one," village resident Arpad Roganyi said.
    Townsfolk can also phone each other in the village free of charge, and the Boly set-top box allows them to surf the internet on their television sets.
    They also have access to more than 50 satellite TV channels broadcast down the same line all in their original TV quality.
    The mayor, Jozsef Hars, a driving force behind the high-tech development since 1990, has many more plans.
    "There will be a video library. We would also like to operate the channels with delayed play mode, but here we need to clarify the copyright issues. There are some very interesting ideas about information flow. For example, the health service management here is thinking about how we can allow local doctors to send a message to elderly sick people on their television screens, asking whether they've taken their medicine, and patients can use the interactive television to reply to that saying yes, they've taken their medicine," Hars said.
    But the Boly internet system is not just technology for the young and the active.
    At the local old people's home elderly residents are keen to use the computers and surf on the net. It's not only residents of the home who can use the net but all other pensioners of the town as well. Some people use it to read poetry, watch photos, check the news or play chess with other pensioners across the globe.
    The head of the institution, Eva Morvai, says the internet can be very therapeutic for elderly people.
    "I think the main significance of it is that this way elderly people don't only deal with their everyday problems, but they can open up towards the world and don't get closed off in their illnesses," she said.
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