Broadband and mobile coverage in "hard-to-reach" places

pippin33

I live in a rural area in Scotland where BT is the only provider and broadband speeds are 0.5Mbps on a good day. Broadband is as essential today as mains electricity was 50 years ago and every effort should be made by providers and government to get broadband of a decent speed to ALL locations throughout the UK.

vectragbw

I live in the High Peak, Derbyshire. We get about 3.5mb on broadband with Sky. It's very hit and miss, and with growing children on the internet too, there can be alot of buffering or crashing internet while we all try to use it.

Also, very very poor mobile signals. My other half used to be with Orange but when they joined up with t-mobile to become EE he couldn't log onto his account - tried for about 3 months with them saying they would sort it and they still hadn't resolved it so he switched to O2. I am also on O2 via Tesco, and again, the signal is rubbish. Tried quite a few companies over the years and so has my mum, but we are lucky to get one or two bars. Most of the house has no signal at all - just a small one if you stand in front of the window! :mad: When I want to send a text I have to keep watching the phone signal and moving around for about 5 minutes in the hope the text will go!

My sister, who lives locally also between a town and the village, frequently has to ring BT to come and sort their internet as the line goes down whenever we get much rain - which is quite often :mad:

nookey_2

I recall a promise some time ago by the Conservative Party, that broadband would be much improved in rural areas. Here, in the coastal region of Pembrokeshire it has actually worsened. Never a day goes by when we do not have to re-boot our router. I feel that, because we are few in number, we are of little concern to the likes of politicians and companies like EE and BT- yet we pay the same rates as city dwellers who enjoy a vastly better service!

Aweegin

Winterton On Sea exchange, Norfolk. Part of it got converted to fibre, the rest of us got left with basic 'upto 8mb ADSL' How is this acceptable? All of us should have gottenthe option of fibre. At very least enable the exchange to ADSL2.
Broadband companies charge extra to supply, the now outdated, basic ADSL..compared to ADSL2, or even fibre. Basically, on top of slower broadband, we are being penalised for where we live financially as well.

H2clu

I have EE and live in north Devon we have plenty of competition with broadband and mobile networks but none of them actually work. It's rediculous that in this day and age with all this technology companies are not able to supply network coverage just signal would be nice I'm not even taking about 3G ! But also I spoke to bt recently about broadband keeps dropping out and they apparently don't promise anything when using wifi !!! Oh come on all this technology and we aren't to be using hardwire !! Really. Rant over. North Devon shocking signal thank you

ma_baker_2

Why are the broadband providers allowed to charge a blanket price for such a differing service?. Would it not focus their attention on improving these slower areas, if the speed the customer received mirrored the price they paid on a pro-rata basis.

3-cat-bat

Post code is KA26 (Ayrshire, Scotland) which centres on the 'local' town, which is over 14 miles away! They get very good to excellent broadband speeds and a choice of broadband providers.
Even the village a mile from here (semi-rural) gets a couple of choices (plus BT).
Up on the hillside where I and two other families are spread widely about (one family being the Shepherd's who need working mobiles as a matter of safety and security, more of that in a sec) - no choice, BT or nothing. Speeds abysmally poor for Broadband although paying the full rate.
Mobile? Vodafone, or nothing, and just pray that the wind's blowing in the right direction or something, and if it's not then 'tough'. I can even see the Vodafone mast from my front window, but undoubtedly the flaming thing is pointing in the wrong direction!
I think we qualify for consideration by the "group of MPs (who) are looking at bad broadband connections and mobile signals in rural areas " but we'll get no consideration, as we'd fall under the heading of not being "cost effective", so we'll remain, caught in the Monopoly Trap which is BT ('negotiation' with BT is useless) - and basically Vodafone for hit/miss mobile calls. (Other mobile providers have an even worse hit/miss drop off rate.)
It's like living in the land that time forgot ...

chrisjw37

WE live in Aylesbury, near Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

Vodaphone admitted a mast failure problem in our area, "a possible fix within 2 years!"
She asked to be released from her phone contract and Vodaphone refused, despite not being able to provide any service whatsoever. O2 and Three have great service, in & outdoors.

She is now with Tesco on O2 and has perfect service.

Vodaphone has a false coverage map of the area.
The new Ofcom real coverage map shows zero coverage as we know to be realistic.

Try it before buying from Stetson wearing idiots!

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/mobile-coverage

Note: sadly the NHS has a fixed contract with Vodaphone, meaning both District Nurses in the family struggle to get their work phones to function. They carry their own O2 network phones (at their own expense) for the office to call them instead!

Joessex_2

I live in rural Essex and have been working from home for a few years now. I have established that it is necessary for me to have both good download and upload speeds to enable me to carry out my job. Download speed is poor but upload speed is worse. I am not in a position to use a wireless connection and my working life is very difficult. I can live without Broadband on a social level.

jrsnape

I live 5 miles from Manchester City centre but my BT broadband speed is less than 2mb/sec. They have not laid fibre optic to my nearest cabinet and have no plans to do so. Virgin have not cabled my road either. A quarter of a mile down the road (on a different exchange) BT has laid fibre optic and their speeds are much much faster. This is ridiculous when they talk about rolling out super fast fibre optic broadband in the highlands of Scotland!