BY JIM WEBSTER Our broadband is less than sparkling. We have a maximum speed of 4 mbps because our farm in remote Cumbria is at the end of a long piece of copper. This copper is not getting any younger. For much of the last year we have been working with the BT Escalation team because they seem to be the only ones with the … Continue reading A Farmer’s Rural Broadband Nightmare
BY JIM WEBSTER It all started innocently enough. Suddenly I could not download my emails. Now you might wonder why I should want to. Simple, rubbish broadband. If I use a client like Outlook I can still read my emails when I have no broadband, (like now, when we have a power cut so of course the router doesn’t work.) Not only that but if … Continue reading The Joys of Rubbish Rural Broadband
BY JIM WEBSTER You may be wondering – if you have been following the rural broadband saga we have been experiencing on our Cumbrian farm – what happened when we received a formal quote from Openreach? Well it’s official. We’ve had the formal notification from them. To quote: As discussed the detailed quote provided by Openreach to upgrade your connection under the Universal Service Scheme … Continue reading The Rural Broadband Con
BY JIM WEBSTER Yesterday started at 4am. That’s when I woke up and realised it was dark. What I didn’t realise was that it was 4am. The darkness and my inability to tell the time had the same cause. The radio alarm clock wasn’t on. So we’d had a power cut. Now that needed further exploration. Had there been a power cut, one that affected … Continue reading Where’s Our Rural Broadband?
EDITORIAL The UK Government plans to offer more details over its “legal right to broadband” plan. Ministers have pledged to implement a new broadband Universal Service Obligation (USO) that ensures everyone in Britain has a legal right to request minimum speeds of 10Mbps by 2020. The measure, contained in the Digital Economy Bill, is targeted at rural communities where broadband speeds are significantly worse than … Continue reading Rural Broadband Crisis
