The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Community => Coffee Lounge => Topic started by: ramon on February 25, 2016, 11:19:59 am
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These are quotes from today;s BBC news:
Ofcom also said there was a digital divide in the UK between those with the latest technologies, and those without.
It has proposed that decent, affordable broadband should be a universal right.
The report, Making Communications Work for Everyone, says: "We will work with the UK Government to make decent, affordable broadband a universal right for every home and small business in the UK.
The universal right should start off at 10Mbits per second for everyone, and then rise in line with customer demand over time."
The report, Making Communications Work for Everyone, says: "We will work with the UK Government to make decent, affordable broadband a universal right for every home and small business in the UK.
"The universal right should start off at 10Mbits per second for everyone, and then rise in line with customer demand over time."
Many of you will live outside towns and villages and it would be interesting to know what broadband speeds can be obtained in rural areas.
It may be useful to give your general location: I am in Dumfries and Galloway. My broadband speed via telephone lines is 0Mb ( I do have satellite broadband)
Strangely different speed checkers give different data so maybe anyone interested could use this:
http://www.broadband.co.uk/broadband-speed-test/ (http://www.broadband.co.uk/broadband-speed-test/)
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0.8 t 1.2 Mb on a good day.....
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1.9M - Carmarthenshire
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Interesting I took the test on your link and it gave a result of 7.01mb but the blurb said I could get 5.5mb on my phone line. The results were taken using my phone line.
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Ours varies from 3.8 to 5Mb, but after 7.00 in the evening it drops, and frequently drops out - typically 4 - 5 minutes on then off for maybe 10-12 minutes; makes a complete nonsense of 'connectivity'. That's probably better than some of our few neighbours can get here in mid Wales on an up country dead end road serving only a few farms and holdings. According to BT recently we're unlikely to see any signs of fibre or any other improvement here for several years.
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4.23 mb just now. Rubbish mostly tho seems others are worse. Rural mid devon
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Only 4-6MB here, and I live 6 miles from Cardiff. They are currently in the process of putting in fibre (just as I'm about to move elsewhere!) - luckily our hamlet has its own cabinet - there are houses between us and the local exchange that get worse speeds (like <1MB) because of their distance from the exchange or a local repeater cabinet.
[member=30132]UPoneacre[/member] - I think if you get drop outs like that it is due to interference from some other device (and it could be anything, not even related to your property), and it's probably due to deterioration of the copper cables somewhere. Openreach will help you but only if you can recreate the problem, i.e. you need to know exactly what causes it ... which is like finding a needle in a haystack. :(
(I used to work for the company that made the gear that BT install in street cabinets and exchanges)
This is a useful page: https://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_search (https://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_search) it will tell you where your local exchange is (so you can see how far away you are) and what services are available from it. Lookup under the bt wholsale section - ADSL & ADSL Max are your standard broadband, and 21CN is fibre. You can find charts online somewhere that show how broadband speeds drop depending on the distance from the exchange.
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Our broadband speed is fairly pathetic but things work so much better than a few years ago, when the connection would keep cutting out. It turned out that a farm between here and the local town had electric fencing running down the roadside which was shorting to vegetation, and breaking our connection. He only uses that field for arable now so the problem has gone - nice to have considerate neighbours :thumbsup:
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2-3mbps ceredigion. I have a terrible problem with Mbps, I am with Onebill Telecom and have been since last summer; They keep on capping our broadband and we have had so many problems with them, but I cannot get out of the contract till this summer, they are robbers and I strongly support anyone who does not go with them.
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0.4mb as slow as dial up! Scottish Highlands.
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2.84mb - Carse of Gowrie.
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0.45mb Loch Fyne Argyll
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Goodness me - reading those speeds makes me feel quite well off!
Foobar - many thanks for that info/link - I'll have to look into that; it does seem strange that the problem starts at the same time every evening.
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4.76 MB here . Great wealth of service it seems. Feels fairly useless most of the time and I use satellite.
Bring on the campaign for mains drains for all, tv signal for all, mains water for all, radio would be nice... Oh and mobile signal would be nice too!! Wouldn't swap where I live tho????
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0.31 and I am close to Winchester and Southampton!! Its has always been rubbish at my house, my phone line goes across the farm, up through an 80 acre wood and then to my house!!
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About 3.5mb here, Armadale, north coast of Scotland. I was part of the Ofcom rural broadband tests, so I have a Samknows box plugged into mine that runs seven speed tests a day and sends the results back to them for monitoring, I get a report every month.
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Goodness me - reading those speeds makes me feel quite well off!
Foobar - many thanks for that info/link - I'll have to look into that; it does seem strange that the problem starts at the same time every evening.
Our broadband kept dropping out and we found it was due to birds nesting on top of the telegraph pole that'd stripped the insulation off the wire so it kept shorting out. We really had to jump up and down to get a BT engineer and fix it.to come out and climb the pole
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0.5 MB here :roflanim:
Only 2 miles from the exchange in town, but we are at the end of a farm lane...
EDIT: only 5 mins later the same test showed that I have 2MB speed. wow.
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1.13 MB here today. That is better than usual actually :-)
The next village has superfast broadband, but apparently it was not economically viable to do our hamlet.
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Superfast broadband in in the process of being delivered to our village but apparently I am on an EO (exchange only) line which means I won't get it
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We can't get anything at all over the phone line (not even a proper voice conversation if it has been raining!). HOWEVER, we can get 3G, via both 3-mobile and O2 (we currently pay £18 a month for 15GB of data on 3-mobile).
Also, I've just upgraded the broadband dongle this week to a whizzy new 4G-ready wireless router (http://www.rut950.com/) that takes an external "MIMO" dual antenna (http://www.nucleusnetworks.co.uk/docs/router_specs/lmo_4g_spec.pdf). It's all a bit technical, but what I can say is that we're now getting 8-9 MB/s download and 2 upload, which is fast enough for most things. Also that's just with the antenna sitting inside on the windowsill, so hopefully once we've got it mounted on the house roof, it will be even better.
So, if you're struggling with poor speeds over your phone line, do recheck 3G coverage for your area, as more and more areas are now starting to get reception. HTH!
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2.92 download, 0.6 upload
Just the other side of Stirling from you Womble :innocent:
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Recently moved over to BT high speed fibre currently 32.6 up load and 11.2 down load .
We are using six WIFI linke to the modem at present so if I can run the cat 5 cabling and hard wire it I should be able to get almost 50 up and 25 down .
It is fantastic and for those of you that don't yet have fibre optics keep heart , Rome wasn't built in a day .
Pulling hundreds of thousands of miles of fibre optic from the major exchanges to local ones and then putting in new road side cabinets on fibre is hard work that goes on in all weathers & yes it is horrifically expensive .
I dare say that due to recent political interference and nudging from the other comms companies in some case BT will be forced to put in discounted satellite & microwave systems for some of the really remote places as it may work out as the cheapest option in the end .
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Cloddopper - nicely done (not jealous at all! :innocent: ).
I'm involved with our local Development Trust, who are trying to improve broadband access in our area. Our current situation is that Community Broadband Scotland (http://www.hie.co.uk/community-support/community-broadband-scotland/) have funding to provide better broadband solutions for rural areas in Scotland (the final solution depends on what's appropriate for the area in question). HOWEVER, we're currently stuck because the funding is only available to areas that BT confirms will not be connected to fibre any time soon. We've been waiting for that list to be published for months now, and can't move forward until that happens >:(.
As I said above, we're not too bad on 3G, but our neighbours just around the corner get nothing at all. Ain't that great in this day and age when cattle movements must be done online, etc etc ?
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We average 0.6MB, but we are 2.5 miles from the village exchange (at the end of a long piece of string with a tin can on the end!)
Never had more than 1MB, and drops out a bit too.
I'm not moaning though, would go back to dial up or even writing letters to live here!
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according to that test..11.15mb ???
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Another clip from a government website:
The Government has pledged to offer all UK premises access to broadband speeds of at least 2Mbps by end of 2015.
I would suggest that those with speeds less than this write to their MPs and let them know the reality of rural life. However having tried this and received promises from my MP that he would take up this issue the result was that I received a letter from BT stating that they were sorry that they could not provide me with broadband and had no intention of doing so in the future as all funds had been allocated elsewhere. I forwarded this to my MP and silence followed......
I am in the same situation as Womble in that Community Broadband Scotland will not offer help until it has been officially stated that we are in an area not covered by the general rollout of broadband by BT.
Unfortunately no 3G signal here, in fact frequently no mobile signal.
Very happy for those who will get access to fast broadband but not all areas will have access to this and many rural areas will be disadvantaged. Yes I love living where I do but do not feel that poor or non existant broadband is acceptable. (grumble over ...for tonight)
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3.2mb according to that speed test website - better than I expected when I moved here as it's over 3 miles to the exchange and am literally the last on the line. But that is fast enough to stream video so I'm not complaining on that score - biggest issue it random dropouts when I have to unplug the router and plug it back in the reset - can happen 2 or 3 times in an evening.
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3/4 of a meg - although we hope to get fibre to door real soon - the cable has been swinging in the breeze for 9 months now outside the house. Not sure why they thought tieing it up with insulation tape to the pole would work with the winds up here - its trodden into the field now.