Our broadband speed is only 0.5mbps. We are rural but not remote. There are 45 houses in our post code, all of which suffer from poor internet speeds. The problem is not the distance from the exchange but the route the cable takes. Had BT cut the cable in half and run the same length of cable in two directions, speeds would probably be better for all concerned!!

I have written to BT, but don’t seem to be getting anywhere. BT are blaming open reach etc. So has anyone managed to get BT to put new infrastructure in their areas? I know a lot of places are being upgraded to “super fast, ” but has anyone managed to get BT to up their broadband speed when it has been so low?

I am not asking for much, just 5-10 mbps would be nice!! Superfast would be brilliant, but i know it won’t happen! The bottom line is I think BT to install a new exchange/cable, so has anyone managed to get them to do this?

Thanks

Yes, Hyde Heath Village Society did. What worked was getting all the houses to sign up on the Herts and Bucks Broadband site, pestering in person and being lucky enough that the fibre backbone already served the other side of the village so the investment case was easy.

I despaired for years and even considered buying Broadband from the house at the bottom of my garden as their street was covered and mine wasn’t.

Good luck.

I had the misfortune to work for BT for a while. I can confirm with absolute certainty they couldn’t care less about their customers.

An absolute disgrace of a company. Still better than Virgin though…

as most of the new broadband, green boxes for bt,round here have funded by the eec stickers on them i think youll now have little chance

See if these guys can help

http://www.gigaclear.com

Got a flyer through the door the other day

I heard one story about a village in Cumbria or something. The upgrade was meant to happen in one place, but someone very rich moved to a nearby village and that one mysteriously got the fibre upgrade instead.

Thanks for the replies. Gigaclear don’t operate in my area. But I have book marked them for future reference. I will keep pestering BT. To be fair to BT they have at least ordered a “review.” But I know the problem won’t be fixed without investment from BT/Openreach!

Pestering BT or your MP won’t work. Finding who has the local rural Broadband budget might.,l

Nope,

I get 4.5meg at home, it’s a 5 year old house. In their wisdom the builder or perhaps open reach installed fibre from ours houses to the exchange, FTTP is still very rare in the UK and we should have been able to get very very fast speeds, but sadly our exchange hasn’t been updated to fibre yet, they were “working on it” in 2010 when the first house was finished, they’re still “working on it” now, they expect it to be completed in 3-5 months, but they said the same in 2010. I’ve filled in the forms, called them, they don’t care.

Could be worse, Cardiff city centre gets 2-3meg, the city centre exchange is a relic, one of our clients spoke to the head of BT in some function or other and was promised they’d look into it, they did, they did sfa about it. Seems BT/Open Reach consider FTTC is a consumer product, businesses should be getting their own lease line.

Cardiff Bay and the former docks industrial area is worse still 1-3meg at best, the big places have leased lines, small businesses can’t afford £5000 for a line and £800 a month for the connection.

The problem you have is Open reach try to use existing ducts/tunnels/sewers to run the cables. Once the diggers come out its legal issues, contractors, road closures etc. The costs mounts up. At the end of the day they are a private business so for the UK to be leading the broadband revolution it requires Government takeover and your tax pounds being spent on digging up roads instead of hospitals!

Hows your mobile signal? You could connection share a decent data connection if your only getting 0.5Mbps.

Do you have 4g coverage OP? Might be worth using that instead?

Been through all this – live in the next county to Stoner and Herefordshire is a nightmare because of a) how remote it is but b) how the houses are really spread out and not along main roads. We’ve been working with the Parish Council(s) and Fastershire directly. Fastershire are basically a bit of herefordshire council who secured funding from BDUK and EU (that’s probably going 🙁 ) to come up with two phase plans, the first was for BT to meet their non sensical reach target which basically is FTTC and a bit of FTTP to make up the numbers, the second is to tender the last 20%+ (as FTTC is no use to lots of use 2km+ from the exchange) to a more agile supplier like gigaclear.

Ongoing – not sure what’s happened but if we don’t get covered in the second lot, no cash left. Friend has GC in Cotswolds deployment and very impressed. Three have just upgraded the mast to 4G so now I can get about 12 meg.. that’s triple what we get on ADSL so that’s my backup plan.

Done loads of work on this if you want details, drop me a mail (in profile).

We had to crowdfund it ourselves. A deal with Gigaclear fell through (thanks to Persimmon being knobs about access) leaving our new estate with speeds of less than 1mbps while the older part of the village is now at 100-200mbps.

We had to raise around 12 grand to get BT/Openreach to run fibre from a nearby town to our cabinet. We should finally get a 50mbps or better connection September time.

So, you could try this route as a last resort? Bear in mind though we had 120+ households to ask to contribute. From 45 properties it might get very expensive to get off the ground for you.

We had tried & failed however, there were two incidents of cable theft from close to our local exchange they fast tracked the fibre upgrade. It seems all you need is a large 4×4 with a tow bar, a chainsaw, a steel cable and know which two inspection covers to start/finish from! Oh, and more front than Blackpool and a means of getting rid of over 1km of cable. 😯

Search for “gap funding” on the Open reach website. That way, as a community you subsidise the unprofitable part of FTTH.

Gigaclear are just digging in my village so we avoided any of this