New Agreement on internet services made under the christmas tree
At the turn of the year there will be a new service provider of internet services towards UW. The FS-net, once made for distance learning service centres in the countryside, will cease operations. Instead, the University Centre of the Westfjords now has made an agreement with local Snerpa internet provider.
The FS-net had been build up with the involvement of the state in the years around 2000 to ensure provision of high speed internet which the then quickly growing distance education demanded, not least in the areas very distant from the capital area. The first distance education programme to the Westfjords had been a nursing programme provided by University of Akureyri, in 1998. Few years later, 2005, already around 100 Westfjords residents were registered to distance learning programmes, plus some fifty teachers in public schools for finishing their formal qualification. They all needed a robust and powerful internet connection which was not easily available at that time. FS-netið ensured that the new distance learning offers could be provided seamlessly – or what was called seamless in those days when interruptions were daily bread.
With ever enhancing faber optic cables to the even most distant parts of the island the importance of FS-net has diminished year by year and thus it will be discontinued at the turn of the new year. Now local Snerpa internet provider offers comparable solutions for a comparable price. Jóhann Egilsson from Snerpa and Peter Weiss director of the University Centre of the Westfjords have now signed an agreement of services. By that the service provision moves to the local/regional level which indeed is an objective of UW, as UW back in 2005 had been founded to have a positive impact on the Westfjords regional development.