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

alanmac55

I live in rural Suffolk about 8 miles from Ipswich on the Bawdsey Pensinnsula (IP12). Mobile phone coverage on any network is non existent in my village. Broadband is a joke. The max I have ever got is 1.2mb. It frequently drops out altogether. Upload speeds are terrible which impacts massively on my work from home business. I have to use a mobile phone for my work but the only way I can do so is to use a femtocell which connects to the router in order to make a mobile connection. Trouble is when the broadband goes down, so does my mobile! I get frustrated with people moaning about 'only getting 20 mb'. I dream of such speeds. Some of my friends in nearby towns are getting a reliable 100mb connection. Such a huge disparity between urban and rural is simply not good enough in the 21st century. This is having a huge impact on the rural economy which needs good connectivity as much as anyone else.:mad:

Sixpence569

I moved to North Devon ,we have no mobile coverage unless I use a sure signal attached to the broadband.The Broadband is at best sporadic and drops out continually we are I am told part of the Governments connecting Devon and Cornwall program ,but here is the clincher,we have fiber broadband cabinets that will I am told be going live in January ,however because we are a village in two halves only a third of the village(The new builds) will be able to get the fiber broadband the remainder of the village those attached to the exchange will not get Fiber Broadband apparently this is the way the government is meeting its promise to have fiber broadband in the rural communities without actually delivering

Tim_Vanstone

I live in "rural" Cornwall (but 3milesfrom a major trunk road). Our broadband service is with BT partly because there is very little other option. Our exchange (Widegates) has superfast broadband and is only 1 mile away but our service is provided by telephone wires across fields serving the 7 properties in our lane. The service is extremely slow and frequently breaks down. I appreciate that it is not cost effective to upgrade our service but how are we ever going to get a good service ?

Rosyc

We live in a rural part of Penwith in Cornwall. In brief the land line is too tong and too poor quality to provide any broadband. Our neighbour can get broadband as their phone cable is better quality than ours. BT said they could provide broadband but were unable to fulfill their offer when it meant renewing the cable running under two fields. Otello and Ofgem are unable to help as this is a commercial decision. This seems unlikely to change. It compounds our mobile phone problem as there is no signal from any company in the house and a variable signal from one company 50 metres up the hill. All options for getting better mobile access at home rely on landline broadband. We have satellite broadband at a cost the the speed is poor in the evening when we need it. Skype is poor on the satellite system and limits communication options for my parents who now live with us and both have dementia. Cornwall's superfast funding will bring no improvements for us. The community here is too small for competition to make commercial sense. The only solution is for targeted funding to improve broadband provision in areas that are not commercially viable for improved services.

Rogbrad

We live in rural mid-Wales. Our exchange (Carno) is small and doesn't have many users so cheaper ISPs (eg TalkTalk) won't unbundle. I can't establish whether TalkTalk have too many users on their system or it shares the same "pipe" with other ISPs but, evenings and weekends, our broadband speed drops to unusable levels (for anything except email). This leaves us with one option - BT, or another ISP who uses BT infrastructure.
The Carno exchange is fibre enabled but unless we use BT, directly or indirectly, then we don't have access to it. This is a monopoly situation which I find unacceptable.
I would suggest that the infrastructure is made available to all ISPs without them having to pay the significant BT unbundling charges. This situation must apply to many smaller exchanges and my suggestion would truly open up competition and help a significant proportion of people in a similar position.

Browntoa

it seems that its expected that BT (now a private business , not state funded ) bears the cost of having to reach these areas . There have been Rural broadband initiatives

http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/rural-broadband/

with funding from central government but from what I understand no-one else ever bids apart from BT ??

maybe part of the answer is to levy ALL broadband suppliers like Sky/Talk Talk etc on a market share basis and use that to finance acceleration of the rollout

HarryAdney

We live in the Yorkshire Dales. The local village has been upgraded to SFB, but we live on a farm about a mile away from the cabinet, so apparently we can't be upgraded. Our line gets about 5mbs on a good day (about 03:30 when the contention is low - ironic or what?)

There are 17 properties affected by this dumb ruling. I'd like to know how they calculate the financial viability. Surely once the cabinets or exchanges have been enabled, then the money coming in from service providers will make it viable eventually?

It also really irritates me that some cities are getting faster and faster speeds, while the not-spots are just left without anything. The providers should be forced to stop giving special deals and faster speeds to those aleady provisioned with SFB until the rest of the country is enabled to a minimum of 25mb.

Rogbrad

It's obvious, after reading many of the broadband issues here, that the "up to" speeds are seriously misleading.
ANSWER - pay for the (lowest) speed you get, on a per Mb basis!
P.S. Apparently France has a good super fast broadband network - their "standard" speeds are twice our "super fast"! Something wrong somewhere...

Sethj

I live 3 miles outside Torquay and my internet is awful I ring up bt on average twice a week and they just tell me the same thing every time but nothing resolves the speed

aughtonb4rn

:beer::beer::beer:

Rosyc wrote: »

We live in a rural part of Penwith in Cornwall. In brief the land line is too tong and too poor quality to provide any broadband. Our neighbour can get broadband as their phone cable is better quality than ours. BT said they could provide broadband but were unable to fulfill their offer when it meant renewing the cable running under two fields. Otello and Ofgem are unable to help as this is a commercial decision. This seems unlikely to change. It compounds our mobile phone problem as there is no signal from any company in the house and a variable signal from one company 50 metres up the hill. All options for getting better mobile access at home rely on landline broadband. We have satellite broadband at a cost the the speed is poor in the evening when we need it. Skype is poor on the satellite system and limits communication options for my parents who now live with us and both
have dementia. Cornwall's superfast funding will bring no improvements for us. The community here is too small for competition to make commercial sense. The only solution is for targeted funding to improve broadband provision in areas that are not commercially viable for improved services.

Why not get together with like-minded people and get Gigaclear to come and give a presentation on their fibre broadband? It'll be a futureproof solution. We are on B4RN in Lancashire and know that full fibre is the only answer!