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

Anthonyjp55

East Barsham, Norfolk we are supposed to get 2mb download speed, that's a joke. Our speed is 230 kb at any time of the day, which is less than one eighth of the speed. the most annoying thing is if you ring about the speed they will always say you get 2 mb download which is wrong & they don't like it when you say they are wrong.

Debt3WannaB

I live in North East London and I have no (three) network at my house whatsoever. Three have given me a booster box which helped, until I got rid of my virgin broadband.

At the time, Three said that I couldn't be released from my 18 month contract as they had provided a solution (booster box). They are now saying that they have an phone app which lets you make calls from your allowance over your mobile data package, but I have downloaded this and have found this not be a great solution either.

MalcBridge

I can't add anything new to the existing contributions, merely another geographical area. We live towards the edge of the HX6 postcode area and usually get between 1.5 and 1.8 Mb of the "up to 8 Mb" advertised. Occasionally it falls to less than 0.5. While higher speed would be welcome the thing that annoys me is the fact that the telecoms companies are allowed to advertise such unrepresentative speeds.

edjc

My observation is that the coverage maps provided by all the networks and by Ofcom are wildly optimistic. Possibly because they do not account for trees and buildings.

For example in my office, on top of a hill in North Bristol, shown as having excellent Vodafone coverage, there are frequent drop outs. Parts of Clifton (wealthy, built up area) have no signal whatsoever.

It's frankly embarrassing to have to explain to your customers.

I would appreciate much more conservative maps to help choose a network because at the moment it is a complete lottery. That will drive the networks to compete for better coverage.

hileyms

I live in Carmarthenshire about 15 miles north of Swansea.

Every time it rains (and we get a lot in Wales) then the broadband keeps dropping out and then comes back again sometimes up to 30 or 40 times in an hour.
Mobile reception is good for EE, Orange, T-Mobile and Virgin but rubbish for all other networks.

Fernham_Broadband

Fernham is in Ed Vaisey's constituency. He's the minister for Superfast Broadband rollout. I'd say we are semi rural as we have shops schools and major transport links within a short drive. We were due to get Fibre in April. Since then there have been numerous different stories like " the BT ducts unusable", "there are no BT ducts" and a total lack of clarity of budgets and costs. Freedom of Information requests to Better Broadband for Oxfordshire reveal that they don't have the budget or cost detail related to how public money is spent. They leave the detail of how public money is spent to BT. We have two BT lines to the village one is 1.4 miles to a Fibre connection point, the other 2.9 miles to an exchange both are allegedly unsuitable for fibre upgrade. Our 50 year old copper cable is rotting in the ground. There are numerous crossed lines, long outages and noise and internet speeds down to 0.26Mbps. So we can't even reliably make phone calls and don't know if someone else can hear them via a one way crossed line. BT come and patch the infrastructure up every week but say we are "too small" and "not worth" providing a reliable phone and internet service to. Premium customers will be offered an improved internet speed via a radio link, but it won't be as good or future proof as fibre. Phone users and standard broadband users who don't want or can't afford premium services will see no improvement. In fact as the copper rots their service will continue to degrade. It's an utter disgrace not to mention discriminating against those on low incomes. We have just had a new gas main installed by Wales and West Utilities with no fuss and little disruption (just a few short road closures). BT needs to be broken up or at least compelled by legislation to provide the service we pay for.

Narf

I've recently taken over a pub in a rural part of Northamptonshire. Having moved from a fairly densely populated area, we're used to 30Mb broadband and 4G on our mobiles. Here though, for £50 a month, BT provide us with a phone line and 1Mb broadband. No 3G or 4G, but if you stand in the field next to the pub you can get a phone signal.
In a business world where everyone wants you to email tax returns etc, life can be very difficult. BT have no plans to put fibre to my cabinet, but even if they did it's so far from me, I'd still get a degraded (slow) connection.

mgriff5

We live in Himley (DY3 4--) and are bordered by 4 small towns / urban conurbations that all have super-fast broadband, however BT have no plans to install fibre optics in our area. Our maximum speed it 2MB/s.

I wrote to my local MP, Gavin Williamson, but to no avail. His office simply passed the buck to BT who sent me a standard letter essentially saying "tough chuff". I have checked the government website as well as BT, Virgin and Sky and they all have no plans to install Fibre whatsoever.

It is frustrating that my MP just passed the buck. Can you press for MPs to try and get more involved?

purplemoya

We live within a couple of miles of junction 11 of the M25, are limited to 2MB broadband speeds maximum and get really poor mobile phone signals on both the EE and Vodafone networks.
As website content is becoming richer with more graphics and videos it is like going back to the days of dial-up for us. Short of moving house (which seems pretty extreme) there seems to be no solution.

ageingboomer

Our home in north Swindon was built in 2007, but no cable broadband was installed in the area and there is (according to BT) no prospect of cabling despite a new exchange which opened in 2008. Our MP, Justin Tomlinson, is involved but this appears to cut no ice with the providers.

Virgin non-cable was awful, often crawling along at near dial-up speeds. BT is better but not great and still slows badly at peak times.

To put it simply, copper wire broadband simply can't cut the mustard in 2015, and it's only going to get worse as bandwidth-hungry services become more and more the norm.