The lockdowns stopped live musicians in their tracks – until Ultrafast Full Fibre broadband arrived

I’m Dave Arcari, a full time touring musician and songwriter based on the east side of Loch Lomond. And it's a beautiful place. And although we're only 25 miles outside of Glasgow. It does sometimes feel really remote. One of the big challenges always when you're living somewhere remote is that especially when lockdown came, there was no touring possibilities. All my tours abroad and at home were cancelled.

So this is an absolute catalyst for everything that I do because without the live gigs, there's no media coverage, there's no merch sale, visitors to the website and everything streaming. It all can slow right down.

One of the biggest differences of having fibre, the fast upload speed and the reliable connection is that before we got this, I would have to go walking up Conic Hill with a guitar on my back, or perhaps take a two mile walk to Milarrochy Bay, somewhere where there was a 4G coverage, and even at that it was patchy.

So the reliability and the quality of the livestream was, you know, you couldn't rely on it. And that is one of the most important things is to be able to be consistent especially when you are trying to build a community and communicate regularly with people, let them see behind the scenes, let them chat, let them in the song writing process. I like it when people can watch me work and writing a song and they can give me immediate feedback.

Did they like it? Did they not? So when Openreach made fibre available in the area, that was absolutely immediately a game changer because from going from less than 1 MB upload speed, I was able to get 30 MB upload speed. That meant, and it was consistent and good quality and strong, and that meant that not only could I plan when I was going to do livestreams and know that they were going to go ahead and not subject to any, technical disasters or potential technical disasters.

I was able to do things like scheduling a livestream, tell people I was going live and either do a play a few songs and have a virtual tip jar and latterly as a more experienced at doing it, we were able to do ticketed livestream shows and all that was an absolute lifesaver through the lockdown.

Being based here in this side of Loch Lomond, Openreach and Fibre has made a whole lot of businesses viable for people that perhaps had to travel a lot before. There were a lot of people here really quite happy with their broadband speed because they were able to watch iPlayer, watch Netflix or whatever they didn't think they needed upload speed. But now that people have got it, it works with their security systems, it works with cameras and some work from home. It lets them do a whole lot of things, makes things hold more things viable to do from here. And as the network extends further up the Loch side, there are people that you know it's opening a whole new world of possibility and support to communities all through the area.

I think now that we are so used to having the speed of the Openreach fibre, it would be very difficult to go back and I think back even to times pre-pandemic when broadband was good but it wasn't  good enough for livestreaming and the so what we can do now as a musician, as a creator and in fact in everything that I do that, you know, we wouldn't be able to do without the speed and the reliability of Openreach.