Oswestry one of worst in UK for net speeds
Wednesday 17th August 2011, 11:23AM BST.
Oswestry was today named as one of the worst areas in the UK for broadband provision.
The town was sixth in a top 10 of slowest broadband speed areas in Britain.
The survey was run by the online price comparison and switching service uSwitch.com
Oswestry’s average speed of 1.81Mb (megabytes) was nearly four times slower than the national average of 6.8Mb. The town with the fastest broadband was Lea-mington Spa at 18.86Mb.
Oswestry was the only place in the county to feature in the top 100 worst areas.
The survey results follow an announcement yesterday that Shropshire has been awarded just over £8 million to improve connections.
The money will be shared between Shropshire Council and Telford & Wrekin Council under a deal announced by the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. But it still leaves a funding gap for Shropshire Council, which had bid for £17 million.
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Ironic, considering a major BT Worldwide Network Management Centre is located there.
On the other hand, Oswestry is already in line to receive Fibre to the Cabinet technology, which should see average speeds soar.
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So true. In fact in Gobowen (pop ~4000), just up the road from the BT centre the best download speeds I have seen in my road is a whopping 0.4 Mbits/second (not a good advert for BTs services).
There is a cabinet in the road opposite, so hopefully the FTTC will make an enormous difference – but only if this is to be implemented on all cabinets connected to the Oswestry exchange.
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A geek writes: network connection speeds are measured in megabits, not megabytes.
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Another geek adds “per second” ;-)
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16 mbps In Oswestry here, clearly the survey was based on the views of those living in Park Hall, or a cave.
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If you read the article the survey was done by using uSwitch data, and therefore will be from across the whole of the Oswestry area.
If you’re getting 16Mbits/second then you are very lucky.
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this is rediculous like you said “the original jake” with the main BT building technically in oswestry. i think BT should do some maths here and realise if the made it better in oswestry then they would score 99% of the business in town!
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I could not agree more with the comments expressed.
Living just a quarter of a mile from BT International switching HQ, my broadband speed is only 0.5 megabits per second. (yes HALF a megabit. Pathetic!
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