Rural Broadband best strategy – STW masses help/advice?

I’m in the process of buying a new house with the other half, which will be brill as it’s in a lovely rural area, with loads of good MTB riding nearby…however one drawback, is that it doesn’t seem to have access to a great Broadband service.

I work from home using email and Skype so need a good reliable connection and also love accessing video content via Broadband on Apple TV, Roku, etc (fwiw I also work in the broadcast technology industry, on OTT solutions, so want to keep up with IP content trends/devices).

Looking at BT website for the address, it looks like I can get ‘Unlimited Faster Broadband’ at between 5Mb and 9Mb sec which would probably do for work, but isn’t really ideal for me, as I’d like at least 15Mb/sec so I can stream HD reliably and browse.

There is a decent mobile phone signal for voice, but no GPRS/3G/4G data service available.

Anyone in the STW masses any advice on ways of getting faster/better BB Speed?

Possible ideas seem to be;

– Make do with circa 7Mb/sec and endure endless video buffering (I don’t really want to)
– Get some form of data line bonding service and use two BT broadband lines in parallel (anyone done this here?)
– Use Satellite Broadband (does this work ok?)

Views/advice/ideas most welcome. Thanks,

Can’t help but with 1.2Mb download speed in rural Gloucestershire, I’d love to put up with 7Mb!

I’m also interested in helpful advice too!

– Use Satellite Broadband (does this work ok?)

We used this at our outdoor centre. Woefully slow, despite promises. Slowed when it rained, foggy or heavy clouds. Incredibly expensive a few years back.

From where I’m sat, that is pretty good.
We live in a small village, a mile from a decent sized town in mid Wales and get nearly that.
Where I work is too far from an exchange to get any sort of broadband, so we have a satellite, which is at least quicker than the dial up we had before, but grinds to a crawl if anyone has a large attachment in an email, worse if we all get sent that email.
Welcome to the countryside.

Edit: you get a better view whilst waiting for stuff to load.

Are you sure it’s rural? I can only dream of speeds like that.

I work from home, use Skype etc etc.

And being rural… We don’t get mobile reception…

Are you sure it’s rural? I can only dream of speeds like that.

It’s 2 miles outside Sowerby Bridge, west yorks….a bit like the land that time forgot 🙂

Live in a rural village at the moment in West Yorks and get 38Mb/sec !!!! Bloody luxury!

Lower your expectations?

If it is fast enough to work from home you are on a winner.

We get 3 max. OK for work systems, Skype, Eurosport.tv Others up the Dale have satellite and find it generally slower and expensive initial setup cost.

Cheers

I can only dream of 5mb, lucky to see 0.9mb. Surprisingly Netflix works though, if a little grainy at first.

We’re looking at fibre to dish though.

Very rural here, 6 miles to a mobile signal and BB speed of 1.2-1.5 (though it seems to be slowly improving!). 6 miles from the exchange though, so until fibre comes that is about it. Can watch most stuff OK (though not in HD) so reckon 7 would be plenty quick enough. Satellite is stupid expensive if you want unlimited (which it sounds like you would). Talking over £70 a month last time I looked

I use smoke signals to send my bits wirelessly.

\three Yorkshireman

You can afford spare smoke to signal? Lucky bugger.

Adsl only option here but managed to get a couple of extra Mbits out of the thing by removing ring wires etc. Also get a decent modem. I got a Billion one and you can tune SNR to get some more throughput.

Last house was meant to be about 1Mbit. Initially, we got up to 3. Remove ring wire and sync was reliable 5.5.

Also make sure any cap on upload is removed. Sometimes seems be supplied with upload capped at 450kbit (ish, can’t remember) which plusnet removed for me.

You’re probably stuck with ADSL but you might be able to beat the estimated rates.

I’ve had bog-standard BT broadband for the last 2 years. Roughly 5mbps on average, occasionally reaching the blistering speed of 8mbps.

It’s really not bad, and certainly good enough for HD streaming and gaming in my experience. The benefit of being rural is there are fewer people clogging up the lines at peak times, so you see less of a drop in speed.

What I have been doing in the last 2 years is pestering BT relentlessly to get fibre installed to the village. It is now (probably more to do with it being on the cards anyway rather than my weekly emails, but I’m claiming it) and we get Infinity2 piped into the house next Wednesday 😀

– Make do with circa 7Mb/sec and endure endless video buffering (I don’t really want to)

As others have said, not too bad, we’d love to have that speed. Having said that for the applications you describe I can see why you’d want more.

– Get some form of data line bonding service and use two BT broadband lines in parallel (anyone done this here?)

This is what we have at the shop. Supplier is called Sharedband – about £20 per month on top of two broadband (and line) rentals – so not cheap, but not obscene either. Fibre, when it eventually arrives here, will be much cheaper for us.

Sharedband works pretty well, and although we probably don’t get quite double the speed, it’s not far off at all. It’s the best solution for us at the moment.

– Use Satellite Broadband (does this work ok?)

Looked into this for home, where we get under 1Mbps. My understanding is that the latency of satellite makes it unsuitable for streaming video, although it’s good for transferring lots of data quickly. So may not be suitable for what you mostly want to do?

Where are you moving to?

I’m not far out of sowerby, rural and get 6.5mb. BT had to run a new line 1.5 miles from the exchange to the site and spent 6 months doing so – but despite their being demand only installed copper and refuse to install fibre. Seems odd to dig up 1.5 mile of road to install old technology.

We don’t seem to have any alternative yet either.

Point 1 – NEVER believe BT – they’re effing liars!
Point 2 – there are many rural (and in some cases not so rural) areas where there are connectivity ‘not spots.’
Point 3 – BT extort vast some of cash from government and county councils to V-E-R-Y slowly roll out superfast broadband, while still avoiding the ‘not spots.’
Point 4 – most of the other providers are no better because they piggy back on BT’s cables.
Point 5 – satellite can be an option, but is bloody expensive.
Point 6 – here in rural Suffolk (but a mere 35 miles as the proverbial crow flies from Martlesham Down, BT’s Stasi-like research HQ) we have resorted to a community run wireless service – not too costly, but prone to breakdown, and of dubious legality insofar as it taps into the BT service in local areas where this is stronger. Pirate broadband!

5-9mb is exceptional for rural areas….

Typically, Netflix streams 1080p resolution at 3 Megabits per second (3,000 kilobits per second). That’s ideally what you want to see.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/komando/2014/09/05/3-netflix-secrets-you-need-to-know/14916013/
Their claims of 3gb/hr is stil 6.66Mbs
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87

What are you streaming at 15mb/s

I don’t really remember endless video buffering like you describe when I was on those speeds or lower. I could happily stream HD Redbull TV on less than that. Maybe one pause in 3hrs if you were unlucky.

Skype scales very well, my boss is on under 3 and we skype/screen share heaps (he lives in a city too)

Next you will be telling us Occado doesn’t deliver there…

We have circa 1 – 2 Mbs here in rural Norfolk and about 4 miles from the exchange. Fortunately, given the location, there are very few other houses so bandwidth whilst low, remains fairly consistent.

Buffering isn’t too much of a problem, although it took a while for El Capitain to download the other week.

The more common problem is the overhead wires supplying telecom services, with trees and weather bringing the lines down. Response time via PlusNet and BT has thus far been okay to get them sorted.

I’m off to google the ring wire stuff previously mentioned to see what that’s all about and whether it’s something I can do here. My dad would have been handy at this point, he was one of the leading comm’s experts BITD before he died.

Was on 0.9mbs or less (I’m pretty sure the telecoms companies turn down the gain on the signals just before they roll out super fast)
Now on 38mbs. No Mobile phone signal inside the house and can only get TV with a satellite dish

Take heed of dekadanse for he speaks wise words 🙂 Round here BT have been promising fibre in the next 3 months since 2012. The dates keep slipping, apparently due to “technical issues”. They even tried to say that when the retirement homes were built the developer should have provided it.

I can only dream of those speeds. On a good day I get 2MB.

Best advice I can give is to move to the same village as your local MP. For some strange reason his village whilst being smaller than ours and further from the exchange has great broadband.

I wouldn’t complain about that, i get 200kb/s in rural Scotland!

Despite our village being only 10 miles from two pretty big towns/cities, we didn’t even figure on the countries plan for quick broadband at all (BT/Sky gives us 1.5Mbps on a good day).

We had to resort to a community campaign to get residents to pre sign to Gigaclear (company that specialises in rural broadband). Think we needed about 200 customers before they would agree to putting the infrastructure in – was pretty easy to hit that target in the end, although it’s taken over a year to get it all in and connected (should be running at 200Mbps before the end of the year, although they offer up to 1000).

Is your village/community big enough to go down this route? Might be a longer term plan?

The first world problems thread is over there -> 😉

Same issues here.

BT Openreach have fibre enabled* the exchange we run off but, of course, haven’t then uprated the cabinets in/near our village because – to be blunt – they (by which I mean the wider BT group) won’t make any money from their investment.

This exemplifies why BT Openreach – as the monopoly provider of connectivity between the exchange and your home and currently rinsing the state for broadband rollout – should have been separated from the rest of BT. But the CMA have just bottled doing that.

It doesn’t matter how much any other telco invests in its own network infrastructure if it’s forced to continue to have to use BT Openreach for the last mile. This is why the UK is lagging so far behind other advanced economies on connectivity.

*Any fule kno that FTTC isn’t really fibre broadband. It’s just an enhanced copper service.

*Any fule kno that FTTC isn’t really fibre broadband. It’s just an enhanced copper service.

This. Its just tail-shortened copper. Irritates me so much to see those ‘fibre’ adverts on telly.

http://b4rn.org.uk/

Point 2 – there are many rural (and in some cases not so rural) areas where there are connectivity ‘not spots.’

Stirling University Innovation Park.
BT Cabinet is 35metres from where I am sat.
Will they connect it to the dozens of small businesses here when they make a fortune on leased lines to said businesses? Don’t be daft.
But they have ‘ticked the box’ of ‘supplying’ fibre broadband to this area of town.

3 miles from the fibre cabinet here- the villages either side of us have fibre.

we have 2mb….. reliably 2 meg but 2mb non the less….

I’m looking at Solway Comms (regional, I have noticed similar set ups around the UK), they have several masts that are connected to fibre, this then beams the signal to your dish. Prices start from £28ish a month for 5mb. It’s not the same as satellite broadband. They assured me streaming works totally fine and the monthly cap was only for people taking the piss.

And it frees you from bt openreach.

Proper first world problem there OP 😉
7-9mb would be fine – although we have fibre we ‘only’ get 10mb and it works OK in a house with three teenage girls who know how to use netflix.
Don’t worry about it.

Yes definitely 1st world problems 🙂

Next you will be telling us Occado doesn’t deliver there…

Don’t worry, checked that out, all ok 🙂

Where are you moving to? I’m not far out of sowerby

Near Hubberton.

What are you streaming at 15mb/s

use case would be when I’m working and doing a video Skype call, downloading a file and also using a customer’s OTT streaming video service all at the same time (I need it to work 100%) also out of work – when both of us are streaming different videos and and/or doing downloads. Our current 38Mb/sec connection is fairly hammered at times.

This is what we have at the shop. Supplier is called Sharedband – about £20 per month on top of two broadband (and line) rentals – so not cheap, but not obscene either.

Thanks, I will look into this.

Seems like my best bet is to get a single BT broadband service in, see how it goes and then perhaps consider bonding another line, if a single service isn’t good enough.

Thanks for all the feedback and advice!

as has been said that is pretty good for rural broadband – 1 to 2 MB here

I know of two options but both need the buy of the community

B4RN[/url]
or
Boundless communications[/url]

going to try & motivate the community for the boundless route as possibly a quicker turnaround

We had to resort to a community campaign to get residents to pre sign to Gigaclear (company that specialises in rural broadband). Think we needed about 200 customers before they would agree to putting the infrastructure in – was pretty easy to hit that target in the end, although it’s taken over a year to get it all in and connected (should be running at 200Mbps before the end of the year, although they offer up to 1000).

This +1, we have just managed this in our village and the speed is awesome although expect them to finish a while after they promise to…

Our office is local and we run a dozen folk (and ip-phones) off two 4MB broadband lines. And been a software house with telephone support we are ‘intensive’ users.

Stop moaning.

FWIW our nearest point-of-presence is 16 miles away (as the crow flies), cheapest quote is £1500 per month for a leased line – and £9k installation.

Our current 38Mb/sec connection is fairly hammered at times.

I doubt it frankly.

Clobber – Member
This +1, we have just managed this in our village and the speed is awesome although expect them to finish a while after they promise to…

You’re not in East Northants by any chance?

use case would be when I’m working and doing a video Skype call, downloading a file and also using a customer’s OTT streaming video service all at the same time (I need it to work 100%) also out of work – when both of us are streaming different videos and and/or doing downloads. Our current 38Mb/sec connection is fairly hammered at times.

I doubt your 38Mb/sec link is being hammered, but your router may have stats to prove this right or wrong.

In all honesty if you are expecting to download multiple HD streams, files + skype and for it to work 100% of the time, this isn’t going to work in a rural area; and when you have moved in there will be **** all you can do about it, if you really need a fast connection then moving somewhere rural isn’t going to work.

I live 10 miles from the Center of Bristol in a black spot, my speed was 800Kps, by moaning at BT and tuning my Billion router I’m now upto a wopping 3.5Mbps, in the day time. Night time is ~ 2Mbps. Which is OK.

However my latency at times is shocking, normally I’m looking at ping times to London sites at ~ 35mS, however I frequently (every 10th packet) see spikes upto 200 to 10000 mS. Line is clear and no errors on the ports. This makes interactive remote sessions impossible unless you are using SSH or similar.

About 13 years ago, our village got together and we got a community broadband off the ground. At first it was 3Mbps but then we upgrade it to 20Mbps that we get anywhere in the valley. That’s wireless all over the valley. There are 120 homes on it. That’s Austwick in the Yorkshire Dales. We pay £90 a year for that. Businesses in the area (ie hotel, pub etc) pay more but get better band width.

We are just sorting out B4RN for the village now. That will be live in 2016 and will give 1Gbps for £30 a month.

C

You’re not in East Northants by any chance?

Yep, take it you are too?

[You’re not in East Northants by any chance?]

Hi Clobber and Colournoise

I am in East Northants and am interested in this option. I work from home in Brigstock and we suffer from 2-3Mb/s. How much does it cost to get the scheme up and running, and I’d be interested to know what are you monthly charges?

Cheers

mart.