High-speed internet is not a luxury anymore, it is a necessity. Openreach is a UK based company involved in Britain’s digital network business. They're the people who connect homes, governments and businesses – large and small – to the world. Their mission is to connect the smallest and most remote villages of UK via their internet services.

They have successfully provided internet services to a remote part of North Wales in a very unique and different manner. The valley location around the village of Pontfadog proved to be unsuitable for traditional methods of connecting homes, such as erecting cabinets and digging trenches. Furthermore, wireless and satellite technologies also proved to be unsuitable, due to the nature of the site.

However, Openreach came up with the idea of attaching a drone to a high-strength fishing line, so it could fly it over the top of the forest canopy without any obstructions.

Openreach said that even if they had used conventional methods, it would have taken days to deploy the fibre. However, by using a drone to lay the cables, it took less than an hour.

“We managed to connect up virtually the whole village in the valley floor, but getting to this group of 20 houses up one side of the valley was a bit trickier,” said Openreach chief engineer Andy Whale. “There’s a particularly steep drop-off from these houses back down the valley, and it’s covered in dense trees and scrubland. We also had the river running along the bottom to contend with, so dragging a cable and digging it in wasn’t really an option.

To be fair, this technique of rolling out broadband had never been used anywhere else in the UK and we weren't even sure it would work ourselves," Openreach said.

"But it did and now all 20 homes have been connected using fibre-to-the-premises technology, which means they can order the fastest broadband speeds in Britain."

“If we tried running the cable through woods it was also very likely we’d get it caught up in branches and other natural obstructions, so we figured the best option was to fly it in over the top of the tree canopy and then lift it up to make sure it was clear of the tree line.”

Ninety-five percent of the UK will have access to superfast broadband by the end of this year, but the government’s new target is 98 percent and it now wants providers to invest in ‘full fibre’ ultrafast broadband that can deliver the 1Gbps that the villagers in Pontfadog can now enjoy.

At present, the Openreach superfast broadband network reaches more than 26.5 million properties and BT is also offering to build 10Mbps for anyone in the UK who demands it rather than be subjected to the proposed universal service obligation (USO).

Following the success in Pontfadog, Openreach has carried out a second successful trial in Aberystwyth. As a result, they are working to identify other rural communities that could benefit from this approach, as well as train and equip its engineering teams to fly drones and deploy fibre in this way.