The government has announced progress with completing coverage of fibre backed faster broadband throughout the country. 3m homes have now benefitted nationwide from government cash to provide superfast broadband in less commercial areas. In some cases the take up of this service was better than expected so subsidy is being repaid, allowing more homes to benefit from this approach. In the South east 531,093 homes have benefitted so far from this. In total 23 million homes nationwide now have superfast broadband from commercial investment, as well as the 3m from government assisted investment.
If there are problems with access to good broadband locally please let me know so I can take it up with the Minister.
August 13, 2015
“Superfast” broadband is defined as faster than 24 Mbps. Many countries are already rolling out gigabit broadband (that’s over 40 times faster than our “superfast”). We are pathetically behind the curve on this.
August 13, 2015
The use of the phrase ‘super fast’ always amuses me as it is generally around 2MB – just about useless for anything other than basic email and slowish browsing. Still I am sure BT, who won all of the tenders against no competition, are happy. Market failure, government over promising something they don’t understand and the private sector taking advantage of easy public money all in one.
August 14, 2015
John, this is a truly worthwhile project, and at less than 100’th of the cost of the HS2 Super-White-Elephant, an absolute bargain! We need far more distribution and speed in our broadband, it is much better at distributing wealth geographically than a stupid railway line that goes to the same place as a current, under-used railway line, all just because the EU has a High Speed Rail Project and we want to impress them by how ‘on-board’ we are……
August 14, 2015
Superfast?? What’s that. We get 0.5 if we are lucky and twice within the last 10 days we have had no landline phones or broadband due to the fact that the cables in Scotland are not laid under the ground everywhere and get damaged all the time. I can’t count the number of times we have lost service here. Even the engineer commented on the amount of times he has been to our property. It is dire. There is no point in changing providers as we have to use BT lines still. I was told that even though the windfarm being erected opposite our house now will get super fast broadband (due to the fact they have so much money they can pay for it) we will never get it where we live as we are the last people on the line from Girvan. We live in a small village 3 miles from Girvan and many of us are self employed and find it hard to run our businesses without phones and either no broadband or at best very slow broadband. SW Scotland is badly served by mobile phones too. The masts are put in open fields unprotected and the bulls or cows rub against the poles and we lose service. We have been without any phones at all and no broadband before now. With practically everything we do having to be done on computers (forms to fill in, insurance certificates to print out, boarding passes, licences etc etc) isn’t it crucial that everyone has a good service?? Once again rural areas miss out they they are the ones that are likely to be self employeed and need a reliable source to keep in contact with the outside world.
August 14, 2015
I do wish the relevant authorities would put a stop to services like BT Infinity and Virgin Media’s services being advertised as “fibre”, when the actual connection to the home is still copper wire as it has been since dialup days. (This is problematic now there are a few local schemes providing genuine fibre connections, when the term has been diluted by this misuse.)
The rollout does generally seem to be done quite well, although I understand there is an issue with wiring new developments: the most sensible approach technically would be to wire any new housing development for fibre services (and BT Openreach assists developers with this) but it’s tempting for them to take the easy option and put in plain old copper instead. I would like to think the market would address this in time, but for now perhaps a little pressure would be useful? (Right now, how many new home buyers actually know their developers get this choice, so they could request the better product? Which option are the public sector entities choosing in their own developments?)
Reply Thanks for this point – I will raise it with Wokingham developers/Council for local sites
August 22, 2015
We live in “one of the most desired roads in the area” (area being within Wokingham) but are unable to get download speeds above 2mbps. (Most days we average about 1.85.) I have contacted our local councillor, our local MP and BT but no one is willing to commit to when faster speeds may be available to us. (We’ve been pursuing this since we moved here 2.5 years ago.) What’s frustrating is that homes at either end of our road are able to connect to superfast broadband, but here in the middle is a blackspot with no mobile signal and no superfast broadband. Running a business from home is testing to say the least. How about a better broadband speed while we’re waiting for superfast? How do we make ourselves heard?
I will take this up