BARBARA: using advanced telecommunications to bring customer services to rural areas

Throughout Europe the services and facilities available to people in urban areas are generally far superior to those in the rural areas. The gap between these areas is continually widening with the consequent movement of more and more people from the rural areas into the towns. This drift increases the strain on already overloaded services and infrastructures. Advanced communications could, if concentrated in the cities and within large businesses, further encourage this trend. The BARBARA (Broad Range of Community Based Telecommunications Applications in Rural Areas ) Project is about trying to reverse some of these trends and to improve the quality of life of people in the remote areas of the Highlands. The project has set out to provide a broad range of practical applications which will be of benefit to remote rural areas by the use of ISDN (integrated Services Digital Network ) and to later look at the practicality of migrating the services to Broadband (2 megabit/s) The project is also about meeting the needs of real users living and working in remote rural communities so a major part of the project has been concerned with the research into the requirements of the users and providers of the service in the rural communities as much as the technical aspects of how the advance telecommunications and multimedia technology could be developed. The objectives of the research have been to determine the services which will be of practical value and which could be realistically provided. The success or failure of the project is to be judged on the extent to which it delivers services which the rural communities use. Though the Barbara project is a European funded project under the RACE programme we will only be describing the work carried out in the Highland Region for the Highland Regional Council in conjunction with BT.