Rural areas win UK.gov broadband upgrade, but some miss out

The government has divvied up £50m of its £530m rural broadband cash to councils in Wiltshire, Norfolk and Devon and Somerset, in its final wave of pilots. The culture secretary Jeremy Hunt confirmed this morning that each area would receive "multi-million pound" funding. He said that those local authorities bagged the money …

[Anonymous Coward]

yes but,

The thing is, whilst its great those folk are going to get help, why is that people living in large towns and citys still get crap service because BT wont do anything about the network, yes, technically 700Kbps is Broadband but when your only a couple of K via the wire, from an exchange and people living around you are on significantly more, its pretty poor, unless you get dial up speeds BT refuse to investigate

Im not saying this money should go to them because clearly people out in the sticks have more of an issue but BT have really dropped the ball, claiming up to 24Mbps when the average speed per exchange is actually 2Mbps is not far off lying. If BT wont fix issues then they should be forced to advertise the average speed per exchange for all its users connected to that exchange, that would at least give people a more accurate picture of what service BT is giving in a given area

[Ian 25]

500K/s in Kent

So looks like my (very patchy, constantly dropping in and out) 500K/sec in Kent (1 mile from the exchange) ain't gonna improve any time soon then.....

[Peter Gathercole]

This is aimed

at the large swathes of rural counties where even 500K/s would be welcome. You know, the ones where all they have is dial-up and if they are prepared to pay for it, satellite broadband.

This will make my wife happy (but not me or the kids) because she wants to move to to an even more remote part of Somerset than we are currently in, but realises that lack of Broadband will always be a show-stopper. I just have to remind her that 2Mb/s is far from Super-Fast, even if the Government says it is.

Oooh. New icons!

[Refugee from Windows]

aimed at areas

That have already made their own provision for broadband, to enable a two letter named company to get it's foot through the barn door. However you'll never get much out of 6 miles of twisted pair on wooden poles anyway.

3G dongle, reused satellite dish and a bit of inginuity works fine though.

[Anonymous Coward]

To improve slow connection speeds:

Get a Netgear 834G v4 or 834GT modem**, telnet into it, then reduce the noise margin from the standard 6dB (or more) using the instructions shown on http://www.kitz.co.uk/routers/dg834GT_targetsnr.htm

**These sort of modems are typically supplied by Sky (but need reflashed firmware) and are available on ebay for £15.

My default download speed is 800kb/s but reducing the noise margin to 1.1 db, I get 1800 kb/s with very few disconnects. Caveat - I'm in a rural area with negligible electrical noise. The speed improvement is well worth the occasional dropout. Note that the custom settings have to be re-entered if the modem is power cycled.

[Anonymous Coward]

County-wide?

Sorry if I missed this in the article, but where does that leave residents of these counties, who don't live in what could be called the "rural" bits?

I live in one of the aforementioned counties, but on the outskirts of one of its major towns. One would think that being located in an area which was a field a decade ago (and roughly a mile from a new-ish exchange), would mean we're sitting on a cooking connection. Far from it - we're lucky even to approach 2Mbps on a good day, and I understand we could be waiting a while to get hooked up to BT Infinity in these parts. And this town is supposed to be a "broadband hotspot"...

I don't begrudge the country-dwellers of our region a decent ADSL connection, but I also wouldn't object to being able to join the party too, y'know?

(P.S. Have you got The Oatmeal to design you some new icons?)

[Anonymous Coward]

totally

agree, it does seem odd that newer homes seem to have worse connections, im talking mid90s onwards, at least where i come from.

i dont know, im starting to think we really need some form of compertition on this, BT have no incentive to fix things when no one is competing with them, cable hasnt had a network push in decades and as pointed out satilite is pretty poor or expencive, and HSPA with its silly "Unlimited" (1GB) limits is near on useless for home useage

BT well an trully have us over a barrel and we just have to sit there and take it whilst being charged more every year to support a roll out of FTTC/FTTP that we will never likely see in the next decade

[dannysmess]

Half a Job

I echo the others. I live a stones throw away from my exchange the property less than 70 yards away has 24mb broadband yet im told by BT its not due to be roled out in my area for atleast another 6 months.

They refuse to tell me which street box i'm connected to as I'm sure we're connected to the same box, yet because I'm with Sky they will not entertain my call.

How about BT finish the jobs in the areas they're in. Else all you'll keep getting is frustrated customers with inferior drop out broadband to their neighbours.

Yes rural is important but they're all they're adding is more enoyed customers to their list.

[Anonymous Coward]

sat

How can satellite broadband possibly be "superfast"?

its crap!

[Anonymous Coward]

sat speeds

its faster than what i get via ADSL only a couple of k away from the exchange - via the wire, hell, even the uploads are faster!

The only real down side to Sat BB is latency is crap.

[M7S]

"Some miss out"

Given the relative proportion of parts of the country not getting this upgrade, is this not like saying "Lottery creates many millionaires, but a couple of unlucky people dont get the jackpot"?

I'd expect some spin like this from BT but something a little more incisive from El Reg, or am I missing the point?