Rural Shropshire struggles on slow broadband
Wednesday 9th November 2011, 7:00PM GMT.
Thousands of people in rural parts of Shropshire are still struggling along with snail-like broadband speeds despite an £8 million Government grant to upgrade the county’s service, it has been claimed.
Councillor Heather Kidd, Shropshire councillor for Worthen and Chirbury, described broadband in rural areas of south Shropshire as ‘terrible’.
She said Government funding to Shropshire Council for upgrades was ‘woefully inadequate.’
The authority was recently granted £8.2 million by Broadband Delivery UK to help roll out high speed internet in the county.
But Councillor Kidd said the grant was not enough and people in rural Shropshire were struggling to access even basic broadband.
She said: “After two failed bids the council eventually received a grant of £8.2m – to be shared with Telford – from the Government.
“When you compare it with other counties this is woefully inadequate.
“Cornwall for example applied, and received, £132m in total to upgrade the county’s telephone lines to fibre optics.
“What is worse is that they have also failed to motivate partners such as BT to invest much in the process.
“They are simply not interested in rural Shropshire as there is too little business in it for them.
“I have spoken to farmers who have to come to the broadplace in Chirbury to fill out forms for Defra because they cannot access the internet at home.”
Councillor Richard Huffer, for Clee, said businesses in rural areas of the country were also suffering.
“The reason this is so important is the impact that this is going to have on businesses large and small in rural areas of the county,” he said.
“Technology does not stand still and, for a business to remain competitive, it must have access to the latest broadband.”
Councillor Martin Taylor-Smith, Shropshire Council cabinet member for IT, said: “Improving broadband in Shropshire is a challenge for everyone, not just the council, and we are working incredibly hard on improving coverage in rural areas, including lobbying BT to improve infrastructure.
“We are well aware the £8.2 million provided by the Government will need to be boosted by further investment, which is why the council has already invested £2 million and cabinet will consider putting in some further funding.”
By Catherine Ferris
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Never mind rural Shropshire what about Shrewsbury? Many people living in the town get less than 2mbps! Especially those with a long phone line and are connected to the town walls exchange.
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Broadband speed with me; is download 0.52 Mbps and upload is 0.37 Mbps. Viewing things on U-tube is bad, playback keeps buffering. We could do with faster broadband.
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The points made above are well understood by the council and if our County is to compete in the 21st century need be be urgently addressed. The following three recommendations are being made at next weeks cabinet:
1) Agree to an additional £6.2 million being assigned to improve broadband in the Councils 2012/13 capital budget, to match fund the required investment in improving Shropshire wide broadband access.
2) Agree to local options to improve broadband alongside working on the national Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) procurement.
3) Agree to an additional £725,000 revenue budget allocation to deliver the national Broadband Delivery UK programme in Shropshire.
This is in addition to the £2m in this year’s budget and the over £5m spent in completing a backbone network, including fibre optic in April this year. Follow progress on our website and also give us your support in keeping up the pressure on companies such as BT, whose investment in our County is in the bottom three in the country!
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M Taylor-Smith – £6.2M????? You merrily hack back our services mais, voila, £6.2M. How’s the iPad project going, by the way? I hope Shropshire Council’s justification for this is better than that used for The Wakeman closure…..
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It’s not just “rural” Shropshire that is affected, Ludlow also has super-slow broadband.
I couldn’t believe the speed when I moved here last December, I used to have super-fast 50mbps fibre-optic broadband from Virgin Media in Warrington, now I’ve got a choice of 2mbps from Plus.net/BT and it doesn’t matter which ISP I switch to all can only offer me 2mbps.
It’s beyond a joke, I’d like to be able to watch The Apprentice but it’s on at the same time that the TV is in use to watch two other shows (one recording on Sky+) so I tried watching it on iPlayer and it’s stop-start all the time, I can’t watch this.
Even worse I noticed recently that next year BT plan to upgrade the Ludlow exchange from 2mbps to 2.5mbps – are they having a laugh??? If they’re going to upgrade it why not fully upgrade it to fibre optic at the time rather than mess around upgrading it in bits. It seems Ludlow is stuck in a black hole for everything including fibre-optic broadband with lots of other surrounding exchanges all on the list for the upgrade including Hereford, Telford, Newtown, etc but no Ludlow.
What is needed here is some company founding their own broadband business in Shropshire, and instead of messing around with the overpriced and inadequate broadband through the airwaves or satellite broadband, actually investing in fibre optic in this area. Many other rural areas now have fibre optic because broadband firms started there – Lancashire had Telewest who founded themselves there and introduced cable and Fibre Optics to the whole of Lancashire, Yorkshire has Plus Net who are putting in the fibre optics and high speed ADSL2 round there, Hull has Kingston Communications, Devon and Cornwall has Eclipse, Cheshire had Cable & Wirelesss, Shropshire doesn’t have any proper ISP to do this and it’s no use relying on BT to do it, BT are very rutheless and only bothered about where they have competition – i.e. Virgin media areas, anywhere else forget it. All it would take is one small firm to try and bring out super-fast broadband round here and BT would be all over them trying to gain customers back.
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This is getting SO frustrating.
HOW many times must we say this?? – we’ve been in the Shropshire Star – we’ve been to Shropshire council – we spoken to local MPs…
AND NO-ONE takes any notice !! – yet STILL EVERYONE IS COMPLAINING – when the answer is under your nose !!
Hoestrly- you’d think people would be banging on our front door 24/7 !!!!!
We are currently installing microwave internet connectivity in shropshire which will give you very high speeds up to 50Mb/s. (in BOTH Directions with VERY LOW latency!)
We are actually doing this NOW.YES – NOW
Go and have a look on facebook for “Unitron”
We’ve looked at getting a share (even a minute amount of this so called £8.2M – but there’s nothing there for companies like us that are ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING!!
All this £8.2M is going to do, IMO, is to speed up the introduction of “Fibre to the cabinet” (BT’s version is called “infinity”) which will only benefit areas of high population. (ie – where’s there money to be made – and a quick return on investment
It WONT help those in rural areas!!!
So – I ve given you the place to look, so let’s hear from you !
Regards
Askeric dotcom
So there it is !!!
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There is no hope for rural exchanges ever getting upgraded by BT so as to be able to afford a good broadband speed. The best hope, because it must be less expensive to do so, is for mobile 3G plus and 4G coverage to be extended to cover the whole region. Then mobile connections, either via USB dongles or mobile phones tethered to PCs etc, would be able to provide a decent broadband speed.
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At present broadband is only available by paying £13 per month rental for a BT line and phone service that you don’t necessarily want. With my mobile contract I get free unlimited calls to landlines plus unlimited internet (fair usage),and more texts and minutes to mobiles than I can handle for just £30 per month. BT call charges are insanely expensive, starting with a 12p set up fee for each call and then so much per minute thereafter. I want broadband without the overhead of a phone line. The best answer would be Wifi from the local cabinet.
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Slow broadband speeds! We have moved into a house and taken out a contract with BT for the supply of landline and broadband for an engineer to come and install but tell us it will never work because of the distance we are from the exchange. We then find out we are not even connected to our closest exchange!
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Hey Salopians all around the Wrekin! – what is or are mps? A dream – here where I live in Germany we measure our DSL speed in bits! My actual: Upload 78kb – Download 384kbs. Does not stop me keeping an eye on the homeland though.
By comparison, in Germany the situation has to be solved by the Communities – which costs extra of course. Essentially if you live in the town you pay xyz EURs for the two wire in the wall and can achive maximum speed – if you live in the countryside you pay the same xyz EURs and get a small rebate from your provider (if you’re lucky) and achieve bit-rates.
Be happy Salopians that the UK Government is subbing the problem.
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You have to think logically. BT or any other provider is not state owned and like all businesses they are there to at the very least, make a profit and cover their costs to remain operational.
Spending millions and millions of pounds of their own money in areas of low population density means it will almost certainly be done so at a loss as numbers wont be sufficient to cover the intial outlay.
This is why large populated areas are being done first, and the revenue generated by them re-invested into rural areas.
Have a look at the latest roll out of super fast broadband on the BT website and you will see that more areas, even less densly populated areas are now and will be covered soon.
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Broadband is NOT a life support machine. It wasn’t so long ago that all we had was dial up Internet where you couldn’t even make a call at the same time as being on the Internet. It’s a sad state of affairs if this is you have to moan about, when all you want to do is play games/ browse the ‘net/update your status on so called social network sites etc. If you use it for business purposes then you should have thought of that before setting up the company but what happened to a telephone call or a fax machine. Madness.
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If you choose to live in a rural area, why should the rest of the country pay towards your having a faster Internet connection?
Fairly telling that the prime demand is for entertainment not business purposes..
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