Nov. 27 - The pace of life in the Hungarian village of Boly may be laid back, but the speed of the internet is super speedy.
The town's mayor says Boly's local area network is transforming the way the community conducts its affairs.
Matt Cowan reports
Soundbites:
Arpad Roganyi, Village Resident Technology may have helped to turn the world into a global village, but it's also turning this Hungarian village into a more close-knit community. Boly is wired..in both the figurative and literal sense. Most of its 38 hundred residents have a very fast connection to the internet - 10 megabits per second - and they don't like to discuss the way things were beforeSOUNDBITE: Arpad Roganyi, Village Resident, saying (Hungarian): "You cannot even compare it with the old system, this one is incredibly faster. Boly residents are also connected to each other's homes, so townsfolk can also phone each other in the village free of charge. They can also surf the internet on their TV thanks to a set top box that is the local standard. Mayor Jozsef Hars says the local area network is making a big difference in the way things are done around here.SOUNDBITE: Mayor of Boly Village, Jozsef Hars, saying (Hungarian): "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." The reason Boly is so far head of the technology curve relates to the fabric of the town. It has a strong German-speaking minority and when foreign channels first appeared following the fall of communism, a good deal of the population was very keen to access German TV channels... but with a third of households hooking up to broadband via cable, the local internet was as slow as sludge. That's when the zippy fibre optic option was taken, opening up a world of possibilities for the people of this village. Matt Cowan, Reuters
