As some of you may know, my professional life is working for an isp as network engineer, and in that role I end up dealing with larger internet connections (mainly business who get fixed line circuits or fibre circuits).
But at home, I unfortunately struggle with a less than perfect speed and connection and unfortunately there is very little you can do.
Thousands of homes through the UK suffer a similar problem, the old BT (or gpo!) infrastructure just simply isn't in place in many locations, especially those in rural Britain or in places where the infrastructure hasn't been touched in decades.
For telephony this isn't a problem, the old twisted pair copper does the job for voice just fine as our ears aren't great at picking up on very high or very low harmonics, so a slightly iffy copper line doesn't make a difference.
Now try to feed superfast broadband over this and you start to have problems. Most superfast broadband uses high frequency to 'overlay' the digital signal on top of the same copper pair used for the voice calls and excuse of that we don't hear or know it's there.
And there is the problem. It had to use the existing copper, so where a line is poor, the infrastructure old, degrading or with few subscribers it's neglected and the costs involved in upgrading, very high.
Now after saying all of that, here's my situation. I live in the North-east of England, in a relatively built up area, served by a relatively modern telephone exchange, and in a house built in 2014. Yes that's right, it's a new house, in a new housing estate in an exchange area covered by an upgraded fttc exchange. But yet all houses in this new part of the estate can barely reach download speeds on ADSL of 3Mb. Why is this?
Well, I've written to everyone I can, I've spoken to BT wholesale, BT retail, the local council, the builders, local government, bduk and they all come back pointing the finger at each other and say tough luck, no plans or funding to sort this out.
So who says what? Bt wholesale state that the builders are responsible for 'selecting' the cabinet/infrastructure that wholesale then install. This seems odd to me, yes it's a pure cost thing as the builders I believe have to assist in payment to wholesale for the street cabinet, but surely a survey by wholesale would show around 200 homes to be served by this cabinet and think there was a market there? (how many homes does the average Street cabinet serve? I'm not sure)
So the builders to be honest, don't care. They'll sell the house regardless and its the homeowners problem on internet connectivity, they do the minimum required (plumb gas, electricity and copper pairs for phone) and the rest is up to the home owner.
Local council state that as the roads aren't adopted by the council yet (building is still going on in parts) that it is nothing to do with them and they wouldn't get involved and don't have on record any plans or queries on the street cabinet install or planning.
Bduk who are charged with helping areas achieve better high speed broadband also cannot help as they can see the problem, identify the cabinet and confirm the issue but then state it's not in their upgrade plans or budget as it wasn't in place in time for their forecasts so it's been missed.
And so, that appears to be it. No option but for each of the 200+ homes to go with slow adsl broadband and wait in the value hope when the roads are adopted by the council that we have somebody to complain to and see if they can assist.
I'm not hopeful.