Southern Hungarian village becomes high-tech showcase

While you might read regular reports about Hungary's Internet take-up being shamefully poor, the little Baranya County town of Bóly (pop.: 3,800) is putting the rest of Europe to shame, reports portal Index.hu. Thanks to the work of mayor József Hárs, townsfolk can now enjoy Internet access via the fiber optic cables that have been connected to every house.

The town was an early adopter of cable TV in 1989, but with a third of households hooked up to broadband via their cable connections, the net had ground to a halt. But "in 17 years, cable technology had become totally obsolete," says Hárs. He didn't hesitate to do something about it.

Although the village only has a total of 150 megabits of bandwidth to the BIX Internet server in Budapest, the "future-proof" fiber optic cable makes Bóly itself into one big LAN party. Users hooked up to the network are now able to access data, including films and music, on each other's computers (with permission, of course) as if they were using their own hard discs. In addition, residents can phone others in the village free of charge, while the Bóly set-top box allows them to surf the net on their TVs and 50 satellite TV channels are beamed down in the line, all in their original quality.

Hárs doesn't want to stop there. He is planning to introduce automated alerts on TV to remind the town's elderly to take their medication. The system will also allow them to inform their doctor that everything is OK via the remote control. "Three local wizkids are behind the software, with a fourth responsible for the physical network," he explains.

But it's not just technology for the kids, he says, "Many of our elderly complained that the old cable system was too slow, because they were playing chess against someone in South Africa, for example, and were being held up."

Meanwhile, back in Budapest, MPs in Parliament are still debating whether to introduce digital broadcasting in Hungary by 2012.

• Email
• Save to My Caboodle