Where the streets have slow broadband

Why should those who receive slower BB speed pay the same as those who have much higher
speed. this is a rip-off by the BB companies.

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alan says:

I don’t agree.
I’m rural and average 0.6Mbs, but actually pay more than residents in the town as my provider does not have their own equipment in my local exchange.
No other provider has their equipment installed either and BT is very expensive and just as slow

JOHN DIXON says:

Even 1 or 2 Mbps would be a wonderful improvement for people along my road in rural Norfolk. Our official service is 500Kbps but I have rarely found it reaches 135Kbps, sometimes just grinding to a halt! My Camera Club sometimes sends out images in attached documents of 2 or 3 Mbs and my email system just stops so that I have to go to Yahoo and check what size of file is blocking the system and remove it!

We are at the end of the road about 8 km from the exchange and you don;’t check your emails or go online when the kids along the road get back from school because you won’t even connect!

What I object to is that we have to pay the same rate as everyone else for our service. Streaming is our of the question and even the most straight forward YouTube film is usually jerky and best accessed at 2.00am when no one else is using the system.

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Deirdre P says:

Your broadband ‘service’ should be paying you for your time and patience!

H says:

Here here. We get a rubbish service, so why should we have to pay for it? Perhaps if those who regularly get less than 1Mbps (or perhaps even half that) couldn’t be charged for it then more resources would be put into improving these very low speeds?

Michael Palmer says:

0.5 Mbps and constant drop offs. Fiber optic cable came to the school in our village but then transferred to a school up the road half a mile away. They get up to 60 Mbps .BT refused to connect our village as not commercially viable despite government funding for rural areas in East Sussex.

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dyfnwal says:

Some rural communities have come together to finance use of a JCB to dig channels so pipes may be laid in which fibre optic cables may be placed. It is a lot cheaper than asking BT to do the entire work.

Les says:

My provider is utility warehouse, who have a pretty good reputation and I started with them because of Which? Recommendations. I live in London and, when I checked, was getting 4 Mbps. I contacted UW about this and they improved it to 6 Mbps. It seems fast enough for what I use it for, but, from what you say in this article, nowhere near what it should be, especially in London.

RichardParish says:

I am with AOL and most of the time can only get between 0.5 and 0.2 mbps download speed, despite being told that that we should receive approximately 3.7. We have been reporting this for months. AOL claim that the fault is with BT, who supply the line, and BT say that it is AOL. Eventually, all that AOL could suggest was that we should go to one of their competitors, who should be able to provide a better service. I have had my AOL email address for around 15 years and the disruption both personally and from a business point of view will be huge. It is about time that consumers received an accurate description of their broadband speed and the service they pay for!

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Jane says:

We changed from AOL due to appalling service about 5 years ago. (There was an immediate improvement in performance.) My husband has kept his AOL email and just logs in online. Maybe you could do this? That is how AOL keep people for so long – the worry about email addresses.. Good luck,

Jane says:

I also should have added a lot of the problems seemed to be due to the out of date router we had from AOL – yet they never suggested upgrading it. We are in a rural area so speeds not great but much quicker and MUCH MUCH better customer service from Zen. We were fed up of dealing with Asian call centres. Only got to speak to someone in Ireland when we had already decided to leave…

BBSlowcoach says:

If you wish to stick with AOL persistence counts.

First, do ALL the homework you can on the connectivity available via your exchange. Start here http://www.telephone-exchange.co.uk. If it is 21CN WBC enabled AOL/TalkTalk are putting their own equipment into such exchanges I believe – they have at mine – but they will not inform you – ask to be switched from ADSL to this faster service.

Otherwise, second, just raise a complaint. Hopefully this will get you connected to the Level 2 technicians who have the authority to take matters forward Usually a ‘Brightsparks’ engineer will authorised to call to inspect your equipment. Make absolutely certain that all your equipment in the house is fully functioning. Any fault found will see them bill you £150 for call out fee but free if nothing wrong in the house found. AOL did change my router to their latest at the time but I saw no performance difference.

Third, if Brightsparks cannot help a call for a BT Whosale engineer to investigate any line issues will be authorised. AOL, BT Retail etc have separate but similar contracts with BT Openreach. If you need to get this far, this is when you can use the expertise of the Openreach engineer’s advice if he finds ‘nothing wrong’.

Finally, if no improvements have been made thus far after all this investigative work, write to Ms Dido Harding, CEO of TalkTalk – the address is listed on the TalkTalk company website not the broadband sales website! She has an office that deals with such complaints and, as I discovered, ‘things happen’.

Once I was switched over to the AOL/TalkTalk equipment my speed went from an intermittenet 0 to 2mb to a relatively steady 5.6mb.

Good Luck and hope you find it all a ‘doable’.

Unfortunately, I think that AOL have software/policy issues as well – currently I have a complaint registered at the Ombudsman’s office for investigation.

E Nicholson says:

I also obtain around 0.5mb download at evenings from 5pm onwards as the locals get home an fire up the internet.I am rural and as other pay full whack for an inferior service.Can we get this to stop somehow

Sonia Fox says:

I live in a rural area some 5 kilometers from our exchange. I signed up with talktalk in 2012 and for over 18 months did battle with them over my download speeds, at most 1mb and often below. I signed up for a second year when told that fibre optics would soon be available. However that did not happen and I said I wanted to be released from my contract. This was a long and painful process, but with persistence and hours on the phone I succeeded in leaving talktalk and received a refund for 5 unused months of my contract.
On advice given by an independent organisation on line I signed up with Sky who guaranteed a download speed of at least 3.5mbs. They took a lot of trouble setting up my broadband and achieved a speed of 4.3 mbs. I can now watch videos and use BBC iplayer. Sky costs me a bit more than talktalk but it is worth it as I avoid all the frustration.

James Bryant says:

It’s the drop-offs that annoy me. I can’t use VOIP, and many downloads restart from the beginning so that a large one can use eight to ten times its size from my allowance because it had to try ten or fifteen times before I was successful. There are no refunds for data lost by drop-offs.

Colin D Fox says:

BT have performed brilliantly.
Recently moving to a rural Essex village is a lovely lifestyle so I accept I might have poor connections. We are a long way from the exchange and someone has to pay for the several miles of connection.
BT were polite but said that we would not be having fibre optics in the foreseeable future.
However, I went ahead with BT and actually the connection was good enough for me but films and catch up TV were not on. Within weeks of signing up BT improved the speed for the village which moved me from about 0.6 to 1.9 what a nice difference ! BT then opted to connect us to fibre optics and now I have plenty of speed for films, TV catch up and anything else. So well done BT, I am one very happy customer.

Ali says:

Earlier this year I needed a new router to connect to AOL. Afterwards big problems with drop-outs, sometimes every few minutes. Helpline contacted and they tweaked the system, etc and advised me to keep a log of use and any problems. Did this and called back a couple of weeks later. Engineer visit booked and after some work and another new router, I now seem to have an AOL system that works. Faster too at 3.9mb compared with a previous 1.0mb. Its fast enough for my use – I do not download films, etc. Interested to find out that it was a Talk-Talk engineer who came to sort the problem, seems to be part of the same company.

Suzie Mitchell says:

I manage to get 0.25 speed if I am lucky. Recently when speaking to BT again about the lack of speed or indeed the lack of internet, I am always told that it is due to traffic and that I am at the end of the line and far from the exchange. The customer service agent on the last call said that there way nothing more that they can do for me, except forego the cancellation fee so that I could cancel broadband. This would leave me with nothing. In the last year I have engineers out to check the line and each time they have said I should get at least one speed, and that there is nothing wrong with my line. I agree with others who have said why should we pay the same as others who enjoy exceptional speed. Oh and infinity is across the street but will not be coming my way. Oh happy internet days.

Pete Jones says: