Rural Britain needs faster, more reliable broadband

COMMENT

Country folk deserve reliable broadband as much as city dwellers, says silicon.com's Nick Heath. So why are rural areas being left behind?

UK industry was brought to its knees by the miners' strikes and power brownouts of the 1970s. Thirty years on, one would think those dark days of outages are a thing of the past.

Think again. Today the power might be flowing but it is the bits and bytes of the internet that have run dry.

While universal broadband speeds of up to 2Mbps by 2012 might seem like a modest goal for the government to set itself with the Digital Britain plan, for remote areas of the country even a steady 1Mbps can still seem like a pipedream.

Speeds of 'up to' 2Mbps are no good here - far more important is a guaranteed minimum service, even if we're talking about 'down to' 1Mbps. Slow broadband is better than no broadband at all.

Compare it to cars. What use is a Porsche with a top speed of 190mph if it breaks down every time you get to the end of the road?

Take a trip to Hemyock, a picturesque village folded among Devon's rolling hills, where getting online is proving to be a daily battle for some unlucky residents.

For eight months my parents and their neighbours living there have struggled with broadband connections as temperamental as the English summer weather.

Just yesterday my family's connection dropped 15 times in one day - it happens without warning and can stop working for hours at a time, and coincides with an incessant crackle on the line.

The source of the problem has proved as elusive as Iraqi WMDs, with both the ISP and BT struggling to pinpoint this ghost in the machine. Despite hours on the phone to tech support and the installation of new telephone lines and a junction box at the house, the faults persist at my parents' house.

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Hemyock is not alone. A quarter of all rural households and businesses are without a "reliable" connection at speeds that are fast enough to be considered to be broadband, according to The Country Land and Business Association (CLA).

Ofcom's findings that the average rural user enjoyed a broadband speed of 3.3Mbps, just below the urban average of 4.6Mbps, are hard for the CLA to swallow.

I rang up Charles Trotman, head of rural business development for the CLA, to ask him about the state of rural broadband. He told me: "Many rural areas cannot get a consistent 1Mbps. We are asking BT to upgrade these rural exchanges but they won't do it unless there is a market return. If the government wants universal 2Mbps, they are going to have to invest in the capacity to do that."

Even BT has cast doubt on whether the 50p tax on phone lines proposed under the Digital Britain plan will be enough to pay for fibre links needed to bring the UK into the era of superfast broadband.

So does it matter that the UK's rural population can't get decent net access? Haven't farmers got better things to do than downloading Countryfile and The Archers from iPlayer?

It's not that simple. The effects of creaky broadband service are far reaching. They can be seen in the office space in market towns standing empty and children travelling miles to the nearest library to complete their homework.

Is it the 'floor' and not the 'ceiling' of broadband speeds that the government should be concerning itself with, focusing on providing the 'down to' and not the 'up to'?

Peter Scargill, IT chairman for the Federation of Small Businesses, told me in a recent interview: "When it comes to voice or videoconferencing, what's far more important is that [the connection] doesn't pack in during the middle of the conference when the bandwidth drops off.

"We would rather see [broadband] set at a minimum of 1Mbps."

This is a sticking point. The government argues it would be prohibitively expensive to offer a universal baseline for broadband speeds, pointing out that even countries with far higher average connections have no minimum guarantees.

But with the web already a conduit to public services, travel, communications and entertainment, and reliable broadband a prerequisite for a modern business to survive, should cost be a factor for ignoring those stuck in broadband doldrums?

On a good day my parents can enjoy a speed of 3.5Mbps but what good is it really if the connection could be pulled out from under their feet at any minute?

The government needs to focus less on the 'up to 2Mbps' figure - which has been widely derided as woefully unambitious anyway - and concentrate its energies on providing a copper bottomed service which reaches even the far-flung regions of the country.