Letter: Shropshire broadband is still slow
Over recent months the Shropshire Star has published quite a number of articles stating how fast the internet is in the county.
Various places have high speed connections, including Shrewsbury, but this is not true for a good many people, and not only the rural areas.
It has been stated that in country areas they have to put up with a 2mb connection at best. Well, I live within a five-minute walk of Shrewsbury Police Station and would love a 2mb connection. I have never seen better than 1.60mb.
The situation is further confused as BT has fitted three roadside cabinets in the area which proudly boast stickers saying High Speed Fibre optic broadband is here. Not true. I checked the BT website and it says not available in my postcode.
I have a further annoyance as my ISP, gives my active speed as 4.75mb at present. Definitely wrong, as any video content downloaded goes into buffering mode very swiftly.
So, not only are the rural areas suffering, we townies are no better off. If you want a good unbiased check of your speed try the speed checker on thinkbroadband.com, it also has a map facility to show ‘slow/not spot’ areas of coverage.
D Lawrence
Shrewsbury
Comments for: "Letter: Shropshire broadband is still slow"
Dai Williams
I get 0.5 in north shropshire !!!!!
Peter
I lve in Telford - as we all know it's a new(ish) town and you might expect it to have good broadband coverage.
Yet one of the principal exchanges is so old and overcrowded that a) it cannot be upgraded to allow for LLU (local loop unbundling) and b) only provides a 2.5mb service at best, via the woefully-poor and effectively monopoly supplier here, BT.
It's clearly high time they spent some of their obscene profit on providing the service they charge us for. It's no use advertising about how good BT Infinity is - we haven't got it and there appear to be no plans for us to have it. Furthermore there seems to be no-one in BT who can be contacted to discuss the issue - any suggestions anyone?
There are cable services locally, a few streets away, and as a result the regulator considers our area covered by mutiple suppliers - not from my perspective it isn't!
So whilst I sympathise with those in rural communities, pleae don't imagine that all of us in suburbia have fantasic coverage - we don't!
The Original Jake
The presence of a new cabinet nearby doesn't mean you'll be able to order the new service straight away. BT seem to be phasing it in, even at cabinet level. I had to wait 8 months after the cabinet aopeared before I could order.
Rich
To the original letter writer, if you are being told you can get 4.75mb then there could be a problem with your set up. Have a look at your router stats, this will tell you what speed profile your router is synced at, in reality you can expect about 80% of the sync speed. If the router is syncing at around 4.75mb then your slow speeds are probably down to your wifi set up/local interference!
Katherine de Gama
We get 1.5 in the wilderness in the Foresr of Dean. Shrewsbury is fast.