back to article Third of Blighty stuck on snail-speed broadband

The UK government will have a tough time fulfilling its superfast broadband promises for the country with a third of British postcodes still stuck at sloth-like speeds. The country's average download speed is 6.742Mbit/s, but a third of houses are below 5Mbit/s, a quarter have less than 4Mbit/s and one in ten are crawling …

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    1. Archibald Trumpetbeetle

      Ha, I get 2mb in Tooting/Earlsfield, SW london

      That's all O2 said they can do, because I think it's Wimbledon exchange our line is one, but that must be a good mile and a half away at least.

  1. itzman

    The slowest places in Britain

    Are where there is no broadband available at all. And its about 24k over a modem.

    The actual cost of underwriting even a guaranteed 1Mbs service EVERYWHERE would one feels be not that great.

  2. amanfromearth

    Science will fix it

    What we need is a better Neutrino detector. Then use NeutrinoNet for transmission.

    If they can travel through 750km of rock at light speed, then surely no problems for home broadband..

  3. Challo
    Facepalm

    Slowest Place in Britain?

    Croxteth Park in Liverpool never gets above 512k!

    I’m thinking about trading my PC for a carrier pidgin!!

    1. Jon Smit
      Joke

      Croxteth Park in Liverpool never gets above 512k!

      Isn't that the exchange that's held up on 4 bricks ?

  4. Boggy B
    Unhappy

    In Plymouth I get about 2.8Mb/s.

    ... of course this is shared between 6 students.

    I would talk about how much the 'super-fast' speeds are exaggerated, but who hasn't already?

  5. llodge
    Unhappy

    Wildly Optimistic

    I would think these figures are wildly optimistic even at these low averages.

    We have fibre into our building now, for isdn30, but no hope of using for broadband for the foreseeable future.

  6. Martin an gof Silver badge

    Not all BT's fault

    Anecdotally I find that a good speedup can often be had on ADSL simply by sorting out the internal premises wiring. We live perhaps 3km from the ("rural", BT-only) exchange in a straight line, probably double that by cable as there's a hill in the way. Our ADSL1 sync speed (which of course bears little relation to the actual download speed) is rarely under 6Mbps while neighbours are on 5Mbps or less. The difference? Our modem is connected directly to the master socket using a replacement splitter faceplate. A lesser difference (given that the splitter is good) is that extension telephones are wired in Cat.5 so there's less spurious noise.

    An aquaintance was very pleasantly surprised when he moved his modem from the back of the house at the end of standard telephone extension wiring to the front of the house near the master socket. Of course it did mean installing network cable to the computers which stayed at the back, but the well-over 1Mbps sync speed increase was worth it he thought.

    M.

  7. pakman

    The BBC Click program featured the South Cambridgeshire village of Orwell in an item about broadband provision a few weeks ago. They were getting ADSL speeds of 200Kbps on a good day. This is just a few miles outside Cambridge, which is supposed to be a centre of technology, not on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. I live in a neighbouring village that uses the same exchange at Harston, and the final push for me to switch to cable was the fact that last September's list of exchanges for upgrading featured 5 in the immediate Cambridge area, but not this one. That was after the village had been cut off several times by copper thieves digging up the cable. At least I had a choice. Other people aren't so lucky.

    I think that the nearby district council of Uttlesford has the right idea: http://www.fibrewifi.com/ . By the time that Cinderella exchanges like Harston are upgraded, technology will have moved on.

  8. This post has been deleted by its author

  9. Steve Martins
    Thumb Down

    *(up to) snail speed more like

    According to those statistics, i think i fall in the 3.2MB/s category, because that is what i get, when it works right. Of course thats only about 5% of the time, other times struggle to get a tenth of that! I wonder what the true snal speeds would be like if we actually got rid of the "Up To" prefix for real?

  10. 2-Part Return

    It wouldn't be so bad if living in an area with low speed didn't mean paying more than people who get a faster speed elsewhere.

    Where I come from, the exchange has no unbundled providers, which means firstly that you don't qualify for a lot of offers such as x months free with Sky, and secondly you have to pay an extra monthly tenner on the advertised price because it costs the ISP to resell BT's bandwidth.

    Somehow though, using BT directly still works out more expensive.

  11. NB

    meh

    I live near the center of Cambridge and between the hours 6pm and 10pm we're lucky to get a download rate of more than 60kb/s, it's bloody pathetic.

  12. Alister

    My thoughts on this are:

    1/ it doesn't matter what the headline speed is, if there is massive contention or traffic shaping on your broadband. If I run speedtests from my house, I get between 5 and 6 Mb/s on a regular basis, and the reported synch speed is 6.2Mb/s. However, on most evenings, I am unable to stream a program on BBC iPlayer, even on the lowest bandwidth setting.

    The government should be shouting about improving backend infrastructure, not offering some meaningless figure plucked from the air as a minimum "speed".

    2/ Where I live, we are STILL on a non-LLU exchange, so we have no option but to go with BT. Despite all the pretty leaflets I get through the door from Virgin, I can't take advantage of them - or any other provider. The first goal of the government policy should be to get every exchange unbundled, so at least people can choose a provider. Surely increased competition will drive provision of services.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'd love to have a faster speed than my 5mbit

    But with harddrive prices still being so high there's not much point, where would I store all those *ahem* linux ISOs I could download in seconds rather than minutes...

  14. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    I thought 1.1mbs as "slowest" was *way* too high

    Looks like I was right.

    Because if it *was* OFCOM would be close to declaring "job done" on this.

    Note Both *main* service providers comes out of this pretty poorly.

    VM don't seem to fill in gaps in their coverage so one neighbor get the *choice* of high speed, other does not. But perhaps given the sort of *contention* claims people are making that's just as well. Of course weather or not VM are upgrading their back haul infrastructure (as they *should*) before their next round of marketing is another matter.

    While BT seem to upgrade *only* where VM are a presence and stuff their existing subscribers.

    Note both companies are behaving like b***ards for perfectly understandable business reasons. The question is what (or who) can exert pressure on them to behave better?

    Customers switching? Might make a bit of difference if you're a BT BB user and switch to AN Other as the cash goes to BT Openreach, but what if you already moved?

    OFCOM. Do they have *anyone* who understands the technology to understand *why* people are p***ed off at the BS claims people make?

    Other BB suppliers (or even perhaps local groups of *subscribers*).

    Bottom line as long as *only* BT or VM lay actual cable to someones *door* they are the only *real* players in the game. It's low margin, high effort but *absolutely* essential and frankly they both inherited their infrastructure and have had a pretty easy time of it.

  15. b166er

    In Paisley, at a business centre, we get 2.8 if we're lucky.

    Even when we do get 2.8, the modem rarely holds the connection long enough, so the IP profile never has a chance to stabilise at that speed (it takes 7 days).

    Basically it's piss poor and we all know who to blame.

  16. John 150
    FAIL

    Slowest village?

    Erm, my village (Sheldon in the Peak District National Park) has an average speed of 0.986Mbps according to our recent survey of all the properties with internet access.

    http://www.sheldonvillage.org.uk/broadband.html

  17. mrfill
    Happy

    Another stickie

    In the wilds of North Suffolk, BT recent upgrade means a nice steady 17.5Mbps. And I can get freeview HD, better vegetables, cheaper housing, no traffic jams and lovely scenery so I couldnt give a tinkers cuss about a few moaning Londoners.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Another stickie

      Wanker :-)

  18. Dick Emery
    Thumb Down

    Meh!

    I could be on a 40mbit down, 10mbit up connection right now. Unfortunately for the price I wish to pay BT's the only one offering what I want. But it's BT. Complete with their throttling and capping and generally just awful company attitude as a whole. I'll stick with Be for the time Be'ing thanks.

  19. N2

    Mais, ici c'est rapide...

    This just shows what a joke BT is,

    Despite living in very rural France, we get perfectly acceptable broadband speeds of about 6.8Mb/s & 0.85Mb/s on the up & good ping times on very similar technology.

    & cable in 2-3 months time

  20. Me :D
    Alert

    Slowest place in England? It just isn't

    Hi all,

    Just wanted to say the place mentioned in the article is perhaps the slowest recorded place in England however it is not the actual slowest place. If you want to find the slowest, try West Bergholt in Colchester, Essex. I provide technical support services to many of the residents there and frankly, if you get 1Mbps you have a fast connection, many don't reach 750Kbps.

    Just thought I'd add my tuppence :)

    Simon.

    1. Tom 38

      Re: Slowest place in England? It just isn't

      West Bergholt is also one of the most prestigious villages in that area, lying as it does in unspoilt Dedham Vale, in the heart of Constable country.

      It doesn't seem incongruous to me that if you choose to live in a rural idyll, you don't get the services that are available in more developed areas. A few miles from West Bergholt are areas that have excellent network connectivity.

      People need to think of internet provision as an attribute of a house, just like they do for proximity to good schools etc. You don't move next to the shittest comprehensive in the county and then complain about the quality of local education.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    But Stephen Fry said it was fine back home...

    The post is required, and must contain letters.

  22. Gradivus

    There is something very seriously wrong with the UK's "Broadband Industry"

    There is something very seriously wrong with the UK's "Broadband Industry"

    I pay for an "up to 24Mbps" service.

    I've bought the "latest and greatest" modem.

    If I stand up I can see the telephone exchange outside my window.

    I get 7.45Mbps.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    you dont know the meaning of slow...

    I recently tried setting up my brother's tv and computer to stream from his WiFi connection and found that his downstream connection peaked at 137kbs between 3pm and 11pm.

    This is on a "up to 20Mbps" line less than 3 miles from Truro city centre and less than half a mile from Cornwalls biggest hospital and one of its biggest colleges.

    I was getting 291kbs from my mobile phone with only one bar signal at the same time.

    Both BT and his operator say this is down to him being at the end of the line, this seems to me that they have not terminated the line properly and can't be arsed to fix it.

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