What does this mean for Bournemouth, it’s residents and it’s businesses?

There are plenty of places where you can read the about the details of this story:
IT Week
PC Advisor
Silicon.com
PC Magazine UK
MSN UK News
BBC News

There are more. If nothing else this story will go some way to putting Bournemouth on the map for technology and Internet innovation.

What does it mean in practice though?
100Mbps matches the speeds you can achieve in many office networks and therefore starts to make many online services far more attractive and useable. Broadband has already opened up many opportunities to home users and this development will improve that vastly.
There is a move already to provide software as a service - see Google Apps as an example - and these speeds would make it far more practical (and definitely less frustrating!!) to use these freely available products.
Many people are using online back up services to back up their data. Again, moving to high speed connections will greatly improve the performance of such services and they will become almost equal in terms of speed and performance compared to locally installed software.
What about video and audio files. These account for the vast majority of Internet downloads. Is it going to become feasible to watch a movie streamed across the Internet without having to download the entire film first? This would open up a whole new world for pay on demand TV and films.

The advantages for home users are obvious. What about businesses? These may not be as obvious at first, but the benefits are definitely there;
Voice over IP (VoIP). This technology is being used by many businesses and is being trumpeted as the next thing in business telecoms. Basically it allows you to make telephone calls across the Internet and can save significant amounts of money in telephone call charges. So far, there has been a reluctance as some calls suffer in terms of quality due to bandwidth restrictions. These new superfast lines could change all of that, making VoIP far more acceptable to businesses.
Many business Web sites now have video embedded in them in a move to add some personality. These new lines with their increased bandwidth would make it even easier for users to view these Web sites and the videos contained in them. This opens up opportunities for businesses in how they communicate with visitors and the services and products they offer via the Internet.
What about software as a service too? There’s no reason why businesses could not tap into these low cost, reliable services if the bandwidth available to them is large enough.

There are many opportunities made available by having larger bandwidth and I think it is great this trial is happening in Bournemouth. We’ll be watching developments very closely.