Teen beauty spot drinkers are ramblers, not rebels
- Dave Burrows
Shrewsbury’s broadband speed one of slowest in UK
Thursday 23rd February 2012, 10:59AM GMT.
Shrewsbury has some of the slowest broadband in the country, it was revealed today.
Telford came out well in a survey of Britain’s larger towns and cities – but Shrewsbury was the sixth worst area studied, with an average download speed of 4.089 mbps. Hereford was the slowest, with a figure of 3.196 mbp/s.The research was carried out on behalf of price comparison service uSwitch.com.
It shows many areas of the country are being left behind in the high-speed broadband revolution.
Users in Telford benefit from an average speed of 7.42 mbp/s but the situation in the smaller towns of Shropshire and Mid Wales is less impressive.
The average speeds range from Bridgnorth at 5.542 mbp/s, Ludlow on 4.341, Market Drayton on 4.138, Newtown on 3.698 and Welshpool on 3.668 through to Oswestry at 3.538.
Gavin Mills, managing director at Shrewsbury-based design agency Clear, said his company had experienced some problems with the slow speed but hoped the roll-out of a new service would improve things.
He said: “We have found it can be very slow. We have 12 people accessing it all day every day and we have now got two broadband lines running to get an acceptable speed.
“That gets round the problem for now but what we are really looking forward to is the roll-out of the BT Infinity system, which we feel will make it much better.”
Shrewsbury was one of 10 areas around the country chosen for a broadband upgrade as part of the BT Race to Infinity competition and the improvements are expected to be made within the next two months.
More than a third (34 per cent) of UK postcodes receive average broadband speeds of five mbp/s or less.
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Slow broadband for Shrewsbury. How apt.
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What a witty comment ?! Not fastpaced enough for you are we? Lack the cut and thrust and banal ugliness and overcrowding of Telford do we? Thank the Lord for that! I’d stay away if Salop offends so much.
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Overcrowding in Telford? Where?
I’ve never felt that. I’d far rather negotiate Telford in the rush hour than Shrewsbury’s congested streets for example.
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Sorry Sinjun – maligned you there. It was tedious Iron Flag doing the “if you don’t like here” unpleasantness
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The Lightmoor Life blog conducted a survey of internet speeds in the village. The top speed of the 19 unique results was 4.79M/bs and the lowest was 0.68Mb/s.
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What a surprise (not). Can’t wait until FTTC become available on the Shrewsbury exchange! BT infinity checker reports that 30mbps download and 6mbps upload will be available on my line when fibre optic goes live.
Much better than my current poor 2.5mbps download speeds!
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I would not rely on BT’s speed guestimate. There are reports of some quite shocking speeds even after BT fibre; it’ll depend on how far you are from the kerbside green box.
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That’s correct but there is the possibility that FTTH (fibre to the home) will be an option at somepoint with companies using existing ducting or poles to properties.
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I would be happy to get just 2Mbps if it was stable. I can just about get 1.6Mbps but only for short periods, then it drops to less than 200bps. After many fruitless calls to my service provider I am told the only option is to keep rebooting the router. Broadband in the UK is a total farce and it’s about time the government came down hard on the service providers who seem be able to get away with charging premium prices for a third-rate service.
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True. I live in an area of Telford that is only served by BT – no other option as the other providers and BT haven’t conspired to get the local exchange unbundled. So its not just Shrewsbury or rural Shropshire that has problems.
In some adjacent and nearby roads Virgin cable is available, and so the regulator regards the area as a whole as reasonably well-served. The truth is that BT have a monopoly, and this is often reflected in their pretty dire customer service.
I generally get 2.7mbps…
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John, thanks exceptionally slow – and strange that you can get 1.6mps on occasions. Do you have problems on your telephone service – such as hissing or cross lines?
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@John Howard They are. Fibre is already coming to Shrewsbury and a number of exchanges in Shropshire in April.
Also 2.5mbps is nothing these days.
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Don’t get too excited – Shrewsbury Town Centre is getting the upgrade but not Harlescott.
And bear in mind that an exchange may be enabled, but BT also need to lay new fibre to the street cabinet – and not all cabinets are being upgraded despite being serves by a fibre enabled exchange.
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My download broadband speed is 0.13Mbps upload 0.38Mbps anyone got any worse?
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That sounds like a fault condition which needs reporting.
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I get 0.4mbps and BT inform me that there are no plans to improve this:( I am in Shrewsbury.
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This was done via the BT wholesale ADSL checker, so far what I have read on-line seems fairly accurate for fibre products. I also checked a leaked document from BT openreach that showed the % of lines at a given postal address that would be upgraded to fibre, mine was 100% for this postal address.
But I guess I will just have to wait and see what difference it makes to line attenuation (basically line length/quality) and how the noise margins turn out.
Either-way, having FTTC will give me a much needed decrease in line attenuation which currently sits at 58db giving me a poor 3mbps sync (noise margin is 7.8db). Lower the line attenuation the higher the sync speed, even if this was to be 20mbps on fttc it would still be a massive improvement what with everything being online these days and the bandwidth requirements for streaming etc.
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@John Howard your not on sky by any chance? They have been having backhaul congestion problems for a while now.
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I am led to believe that Shrewsbury had the chance for fibre-optic cable broadband many years ago through Telewest (now Virgin Media) but turned it down as they “Didn’t want people digging-up the streets”
So they now suffer with slow internet speeds.
Meanwhile here in less attractive to look at but more sociable and up the times Telford,I am now surfing the net and running my business with my 50mb (soon to be doubled at no extra charge to 100mb) super-fast broadband! Yippee!
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It’s a little more complicated than that, but, yes Telewest had a proposal to connect Shrewsbury to its network. The authorities at the time had little knowledge of high speed internet (it is a revolution that’s only really occurred in the past 5 years). However, Telewests proposal to lay its cabling in Shrewsbury was entirely unrelated to internet at a time when consumers simply did not have computers – Telewest would have, at the time, installed its network to provide television and telephone services, internet connection came much later. Telewest/Virgin high speed connections came much, much later and only after significant investment on infrastructure (something BT has been slow at doing; it’s been happy milking its inherited national network and avoiding investing in infrastructure). Of course, in hindsight Shrewsbury should have better encouraged Telewest to install fibre networks but the main sticking point was simply who would foot be bill for digging up the roads – Shrewsbury Council or Telewest and in fairness, it would have been inappropriate for local authority to foot the bill for (what was at the time) multichannel TV and telephone service.
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i…t….s……ju….s..t s….o sl..ow. It wo…uld be qui…icker to…s..end a ….le.tt…er.
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Come to Mexico. On a good day you can get a whole megabyte.
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To see if you will be able to upgrade to fibre then simply google bt adsl checker and put in your phone number. It will tell you if YOUR line is planned to be upgraded to fibre.
For me it states:
Your cabinet is planned to have WBC FTTC by 31st March 2012. Our test also indicates that your line currently supports a fibre technology with an estimated WBC FTTC Broadband where consumers have received downstream line speed of 29.6 Mbps and upstream line speed of 5.7 Mbps.
This is on the Shrewsbruy exchange and I, personally can’t wait to upgrade!
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I live in Castlefields, and my broadband speed averages at about 12.5 mps, although im told im very lucky to get that speed in Shrewsbury
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If i lived in Castlefields i certainly wouldn’t be advertising the fact that i own valuable electrical items.
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I shall never forget my joy upon seeing the headline of this related Shropshire Star headline;
http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2011/09/03/downloads-take-forever-%E2%80%93-007-daniel-craigs-father/
A work of beauty.
I feel it’s time we were reminded of it.
Whatever happened to the gifted sub-editor in question ? I don’t believe we’ve seen his like since.
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plenty of folk on here clearly have no problem
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How frustrating to see that those with an average decent service are getting an upgarde and those of us with rubbish have to stick with it.
For Telephone Number 0174376xxxx on Exchange CROSS HOUSES
Your exchange is ADSL enabled, and our initial test on your line indicates that your line should be able to have an ADSL broadband service that provides a fixed line speed up to 2Mbps.
Our test also indicates that your line currently supports an estimated ADSL Max broadband line speed of 1.5Mbps; typically the line speed would range between 1Mbps and 2.5Mbps.
In reality I get about 1Mbps and 0.3Mbps (upload and download).
This isn’t enough to sustain any sort of streaming and is very frusrating at busy times of the day / week. It grinds to a standstill on Friday nights.
Oh well, maybe we’ll have to wait for the 22nd century network?
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Personally we are getting 5 meg from sky as our ISP, as an IT Engineer i fail to see why anyone from how would need anything bigger than 1 meg, unless they are running servers, or RDA servers.
The only thing that higher internet speeds encourage is piracy and downloading. Which 98% of ISP’s cap you to 20gigs worth of downloading a month.
At 5 meg I am able to log into remote servers, upload via FTP and parcipate in online gaming, this is really all that a home user should need.
Also just to add if people read the contracts taken out they will notice that it states you will gain 2.5-14 meg dependent on how far you are from the ISP exchange point…..
Stop moaning about somethiing that quite frankly is not that important!!!!
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