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

Unicorn42

I live in a small Somerset village and have barely 1 mg. took 10 hours to download new software which my son did in London in 10 mins. Internet often cuts out. I'm with Orange. Other providers not much better, according to neighbours. I have many international meetings and often miss out due to poor reception and slowness. Also I eventually ditched my Orange mobile phone as I missed so many calls due to poor reception. and am now with giff gaff (02) which is good. And cheap! Rural areas need to be listened to, and something done.

vseviour

Living near Maghera/Kilrea in Mid Ulster and everyone I speak to is on O2 yet noone has a decent signal. I only get text messaged when I walk upstairs, and 3g is virtually non existent.

SeaSideSue

I live in a very populated seaside town on a private housing estate that was built 8 years ago. BT have told us that they will not be installing infinity broadband the signal is pathetically weak. I bought a Internet TV and the signal is too weak to use. Only one person can access the. Wifi at any one time. Not good for a home that cost £500,000. Before the election MP candidates said they would ensure it was brought to us, since the election not a whisper.

Pensioner70

I live just 2.4 miles from Spalding exchange and just get 1.2mb maximum speed on an 'up to 17 mb' broadband connection.
Can 2.4 miles from an exchange downgrade the speed so much?
The speed at 10 miles from an exchange must me minimal !!

BethVA

I live in Staunton and Corse, Gloucestershire. My whole family were with Orange until it merged with T mobile and became EE - up until the merger signal was really good in our area and we had very few problems contacting each other. Now it is a completely different story, since the company became EE signal has gotten worse and worse until now we are left with absolutely no signal most days; if there is an emergency we cannot rely on our mobiles. This has only occurred since the coming of EE and the blasted 4G plague. When I have reported this problem to the company they have denied any knowledge of it claiming that signal should be better as they're 'upgrading the masts' in our local area to 4G; if we are having trouble with our mobiles we should get 4G phones as they're really great and the signal problem would be solved. Neither I nor anyone else wants a 4G phone....... None of us use the internet on our phones, they are simply devices that allow us to keep in contact with each other and provide backup in case of power failure/landline problems/emergencies. We neither want nor can afford to upgrade to 4G phones yet EE seems to think this is a reasonable solution. Only other way would be to switch phone companies - which is frankly just entering another minefield on the potluck signal game.

Broadband again used to be good in the area until BT started upgrading us to fibre. Now the internet is generally slower with peak periods causing us slow to an absolute nightmarish crawl - seriously its like the old 90's dial-up that I remember as a kid!! Can we transfer to fibre broadband yet? Nope. No company - apart, possibly, from BT - is aware that we have indeed been upgraded to fibre so they offer no service. We were with BT on ordinary broadband just over a year ago and our monthly bill came with a whopping £70 price tag - not from calls but just from pre-agreed payments to the company for line rental, anytime calls, and of course their wonderful new charges for answering phone services, call filtering etc. We switched to EE as we knew the company and at the time trusted them. I know BT has a monopoly on some areas but this is quite frankly getting ridiculous! Its like the Wars of the Roses for broadband providers!!

I also know Lampeter, Ceredigion has huge problems with broadband and mobile signal as this is where I went to University!

Breaking BT's monopoly on certain areas of the country would be a good start on the road to fairer access for all. Rural areas being developed hand in hand with with inner city areas would be nice - there are homes and businesses that need faster broadband everywhere! New rules to stop BT and other companies charging ridiculous bills would be good as well - not everyone has the means and confidence to switch companies constantly. With the mobile phones its hard to say but certainly providing the same service to ALL their customers would be nice. UK call centres or at least decently trained foreign call centres would make explaining and solving problems much easier as well - currently its a linguistic nightmare as whoever you're talking to usually wants to help but is unable to due to language barriers. MP's check out Marigold Hotel! Seriously it shows the EXACT communication problems that customers are faced with daily.

spowers

I live 6.5 miles from a major city but because the rural exchange that serves my address is antiquated, my maximum broadband speed is 0.5 Mb for which I pay BT's unlimited broadband tariff. In my opinion, the only way to solve the issue is to force the broadband providers to charge based on speed of supply, in the same way that gas, electricity and (for those not on water rates) water charge based on usage. If BT could only charge me a percentage of those who receive 30 or 50 times my broadband speed, I suspect they would decide it was worthwhile to upgrade the exchange.

tgroom57

Where is the map documenting all these broadband notspots? I can pull up a BBC travel map and see local and national traffic news, but surely there is a similar map for broadband problem news?

JJ_Egan

spowers wrote: »

I live 6.5 miles from a major city but because the rural exchange that serves my address is antiquated, my maximum broadband speed is 0.5 Mb for which I pay BT's unlimited broadband tariff. In my opinion, the only way to solve the issue is to force the broadband providers to charge based on speed of supply, in the same way that gas, electricity and (for those not on water rates) water charge based on usage. If BT could only charge me a percentage of those who receive 30 or 50 times my broadband speed, I suspect they would decide it was worthwhile to upgrade the exchange.

Or they might just pull the plug .

firefox1956

I have the answer to all your problems.......
Put a mobile phone mast on every church tower...........
Funds in the church coffers mobile signals for everybody.

skinto_malinto

i live in a small village in south Lanarkshire. the exchange is about 500 metres from my house, you can drive through the entire village in 3 minutes, yet superfast broadband is just not going to happen here! so we're pretty much stuck with what we've got, which is a mediocre service at best.
as for a mobile signal, you're having a laugh!!
as the crow flies, i'm less than 3 miles from the M74 motorway, i'm with vodaphone, and I can't use my mobile for calls!! even mms texts won't come through, or at best they arrive, but I can't open them until i'm outside the village! it's a joke!