The domestic cricket season is well under way and my lad plays his first U11s game this coming Friday. Village cricket has also started as witnessed by yesterday’s #twicket match between Wray and the Rest of The World.

The result is immaterial although the home side won (it is sometimes difficult for the likes of Andrew Strauss and Brian Lara to click in at a standard lower than they are used to).

The real result was the broadcast of the match live online on twicket.info using Wray’s new 30Meg symmetrical connection. The game was watched online by thousands with thousands more tweeters following the #twicket hashtag.

The game was played in a farmers field and this broadcast is a great example of how rural communities might benefit once they have decent internet connectivity.

Back in October 2010 we did an experiment in which Yorkshire farmer’s wife Michelle Brumfield tried to upload a 5 minute HD video to YouTube at the same time as a pigeon carried the 300Meg file to its loft near Skegness in Lincolnshire.

The pigeon was released at 11.05 and clocked in at the loft 1hr 15 minutes later. At that time the broadband upload to YouTube was only 24% complete, and then only after having to reset it as the connection was dropped. The internet connection would have taken at least 5 hours to do the job.

Had the Yorkshire farm had the same connectivity as did Wray yesterday the upload would have taken 80 seconds. In Wray the pigeon is dead, long live the 30Meg symmetrical connection!

As someone who does a lot of uploading of videos and photos I can say that uplink speed is becoming increasingly important. 30Meg symmetrical is a really good reason to move to Wray. It is better than the vast majority get in the city.

The video stream of the match did not need 30Megs bandwidth, probably more like 2Mbps. However there were others in the crowd also uploading using their mobiles. It would be interesting to see the actual data usage.

The point is that it is all about high speed. It isn’t about “up to 2 Meg”. It isn’t about copper. It’s about fibre. Wray is lucky. Lets hope that when the Big Society wends its way around our other digitally deprived areas it bears this in mind.