UK.gov warned: Small biz bods 'blunted' by broadband bumbling Small businesses in Britain are missing out on the government's £1.2bn taxpayer-funded broadband deployment project, a lobby group warned today. The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) complained in a report titled The fourth utility (PDF) published this morning that 45,000 companies in the UK remained stuck using dial-up …
That is basically the reason why our business directly in the centre of Manchester connected to a fibre-enabled exchange for many years now cannot get fibre. BT essentially refuse to put a fibre-enabled cabinet for us, even though properties around us directly across the road have it. But across the road are residential buildings, whereas most of the people connected to our cabinet would be businesses whom they can charge for leased lines.
This kind of thing happens in the so-called MediaCityUK too. Residential buildings - enjoy your superfast fibre. Offices? Sorry, but we will never connect you even though your exchange is enabled.
Yep, exactly the same problem here near the centre of a city in the south-east of England. Stuck with 4Mbit down, virtually nothing up. We're a little company but with big customers, and it's incredibly embarrassing when you've got customers onsite and have to apologise for the fact that BT can't be bothered to connect up our business park when the residential areas all around are fibred. Nobody seems to care, even the regional development mob. Sometimes I think we'd be better off in the arse end of nowhere, there at least seems to be a desire to get them connected.
I've heard of a businesses in a local industrial park using a microwave link to the home of a conveniently located employee to get round BT's apparent habit of holding SMBs to ransom regarding connectivity. Not sure how that plays with the Ts&Cs but it does look like there's a bit of mickey taking going on, so I can't blame them.
I've also seen this in London, I used to work in an office in TW8 on the way out of London, on a junction surrounded by office buildings and where there are lots of residential properties around, the entire exchange was upgraded to FTTC except our cabinet. It was clearly because every customer on that cabinet is business and every other cabinet was residential.
But I don't think it is just BT, I wanted service from Virgin Media Business, I tried very hard because their cabinet was within meters of our office and their ducts passed our building on two sides. But no, they didn't have coverage for our address!!
I ended up getting an EFM by bonding four lines together, cheaper than BTNet fibre but it was only 13Mbit/sec in London!
I would love to see someone like El Reg doing a closer investigation in to this, I knew I couldn't be the only one to suffer from this. Artificially keeping prices high with legacy products by not enabling VDSL or low cost FTTP at business cabinets.
dont worry even residential areas are ignored, exchange is 200 meters away from the house but i have a direct line in ( about 900-1200 meters long... ) and BT refuses to put in a cabinet, although closer to the exchange ( about 50 meters ) they put in a new cabinet to poach virgin customers ( obviously i dont have virgin available )
[ live in London SE1 postcode area so no in the middle of nowhere... ]
it is just sheer greed from the part of BT
best?
I'm in Germany and I work in a small town in the middle of nowhere (less than 30,000 inhabitants). Domestic broadband is 100mbps down, 20 up and at work we have 100mbps synchronus...
I know in the countryside that broadband is still hard to get in places - although the roll-out of 4G is easing that problem - as part of the licensing the providers have to provide 4G to areas with no wired broadband, not just city centres.
That said, that 100mbps synchronus isn't cheap.
Virgin is (depending on bundle) ~50mpbs down and ~1mbps up. Contention rates are high, so don't expect to get much in the evenings.
Virgin are not unique in this, all ISPs in the UK heavily restrict upload speeds unless you pay through the nose for a business plan.
A&A might be different, but they are a niche player selling to the technorati.
As to the waffle from our feckless MPs, it's just that; waffle. Nothing will change, business must be allowed to gouge the UK tax payer without hindrance.
At my home I have 50/12mbps, but that is at peak times as well, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of contention. Where I work, most of the guys have switched to Kabel Deutschland, with 100/25mbps and none have said anything about contention in the evenings.
For the business, that is 100mbps guaranteed and contention free to the backbone(dedicated fibre line to the exchange, not the cabinet).
BAA have also released a report stating that nowhere in Singapore or Hong Kong is more than 20miles form an international airport and in order to compete on the world stage, the rural international airport rollout program must be accelerated by the building of another 4 million runways at Heathrow
Same issue as the above posts. . The company I work for was struggling with adsl for years until a local supplier / subsidiary of a large IT company that I have dealt with informed us about Supperconnect Cardiff and the grant available.
£3k install paid via the council to our supplier. Now we have about 75 Mb down / 50 up. Vpn's to our satellite offices are now usable and once we get the new phone system installed we can do call routing over ip internally, looks more professional and it's cheaper. Ongoing cost £50 pcm, no data limit or throttling even after pulling down 20+Gb every night for offsite backups, can't fault my supplier.
Virgin and BT wanted over £200 pcm for a similar setup. I'm just happy with 2 rather large wifi antennas on our roof..... and the adsl backup just in case.
Towns like the one I live in have no end of internet issues. Average speed here is less than 7Mbps in the "good" areas. Outside those areas the speeds drop like rocks.
For our school, we have to go via our LEA for our connection for a leased line. We couldn't afford a true leased line ourselves - BT would want £31k for a 100Mbit line.
The problem isn't that there's a lack of customers here, its that we're a relatively isolated town - our nearest proper town is about 25 miles away, so we are always at least 5 years behind everywhere else. It is significantly affecting the development of our town, to the extent of businesses giving poor connectivity as a reason for moving out or refusing to move in.
The office was in a building with a direct connection to the exchange and BT wouldn't supply FTTC to it. The lease was up for renewal so we moved, shame to had to do it as we were well established in the office.
Meanwhile, my small business office is on an exchange which just got FTTC at the end of May. The old service needed changing anyway - it had been Be, Sky took over and, apart from anything else, illegally refuse to provide VAT receipts for it now (having told me that with the takeover, staying with them would be OK!)
So, I find us a decent FTTC ISP to move to ... but no. TalkTalk ADSL is cheaper, so that's what the MD picks. *headdesk*
To be fair, it really is cheap, and the resulting 10 down 0.8 up is largely adequate even for two VoIP trunks - just a pale imitation of the service we would have had.
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