Broadband: why the countryside can't catch up

Few people will be shocked to hear that British broadband is faster in cities than in rural areas. What is more surprising is that the gap is likely to broaden before it narrows.

Our attempts to conjure up a 21st-centrury network from a 19th-century infrastructure have created a multispeed internet in which those living furthest from a telephone exchange have to put up with miserably slow download speeds. BT is doing its best to coax data through copper wires at ever-faster speeds, but its efforts are likely to upgrade the fastest connections while doing nothing to help those stuck with the slowest.

A new technology – new to Britain, at least – will boost web performance by a factor of three, but only for about a million homes in the London area. Even when coverage is extended to ten million homes next year, most of those will be in areas where high-speed cable connections are already available.

Without a huge investment in building a national fibre-optic network, there’s little that BT or any other company can do to improve the broadband experience for people living a long way from telephone exchanges.

Satellite uplinks offer fast, dedicated internet connections, but the cost is prohibitive, and wireless options such as WiMAX and mesh networks have yet to make much of an impact. They are, however, increasing in reach and speed, and that’s a huge disincentive for the people who would have to pay for a national fibre-optic infrastructure: no one wants to make a multibillion pound investment in a network that will soon fall quiet as web traffic takes to the airwaves.

The result is that the slower pace of rural life is like to be complemented by slower internet connections – and the resultant frustrations for social and business web users – for some time to come.

Comments

[Dave Burns]

The other area of cost is that a lot of people who are currently on bit limited packages would need to upgrade to an unlimited package to be able to get any apparent value out of higher speeds.

I notice the difference between my first half meg upto 3.3 mega when I download updates etc but as most of time it is e mail and web browsing there is little difference.

[Edward Ebden]

We are in a "Not Spot" that is 13kms from our local Monmouthshire exchange and all the local properties have DACS line splitters.We have been applying for broadband for over 4 years.The trouble is there is little economic incentive to provide modern telecommunication services to rural areas and that includes the new 3G mobile phone signal.Despite that many of us have important businesses including sizeable farms that support the Welsh economy.OK the Welsh Assembly have helped to upgrade the local exchanges but you need to be within 7kms to get a reasonable broadband signal.

[Andy Aldridge]

I have just returned from a holiday in the mountainous Greek island of Lesvos. I was surprised to find that even in the small remote fishing village of Sigri they enjoyed a fast broadband connection (10meg) Although I don't know how this was delivered these are relatively poor unsophisticated people and their enjoyment of this level of supply puts us to shame.

[David Lewis from Australia]

A big but hidden problem with speed is the unnecessary reloading of pages when nothing new has been added. With a tabbed browser and several pages open you are paying to have the same material reloaded several times before you get around to reading it. On-line news services are particularly bad at this whilst government pages mostly don't do it at all. Because this is done to all readers it is a huge and unnecessary load on internet traffic.

[JW]

I live in a rural area and get 8 meg virtually all the time - because I'm only 350yds from the exchange! You can't generalise about this. I know people who live in cities and get lower speeds.

[Ralph]

This has a lot to do with the general economics of infrastructure deployment (in this case telecommunications). I have studied worldwide Internet adoption levels and found (as many others have) the relatively high importance of urbanization. For example, an increase of 1% in a country's population living in urban areas is associated with an increase of around 0.4% in Internet adoption levels. Therefore, it is clear that not only will rural areas exhibit lower adoption rates, but also suffer from slower diffusion of high-speed connections, since the economic incentives are not in place. Ultimately, this is something that the market by itself will not solve, and thus will require some sort of proactive policies to level the playing field.

Note: my comment is not specifically geared towards the UK. One would expect this problem to be more severe in the developing world.

[Mick N]

I moved to a small rural vilage in Herefordshire 3 years ago and found comments like those above, but whilst everyone moaned about poor connection speeds via dial up they expected BT to magic a high speed connection, unrealistic at best, so I contacted our Rural development agency and got some local support and with a little effort arranged a 2 way central satelite link for 3 local villages with a WI FI link to everyone else, it costs slightly more than normal but is fast and effective and is subsidised by the RDA for a minimum 3 years, its goverment policy to develop broadband and the funding for local schemes seems to be there.
Dont moan about it DO somthing get off you backsides, and do somthing

[Bill Allen]

This disparity in broadband speeds is totally unacceptable. I live in a small village midway between a couple of medium sized towns (about 4 miles apart). When I moved here three years ago, I was struggling to get 2Mb/s downloads, and now I can only get 700kbs on a good day - and this is on an "up to 8Mb/s" contract. Change ISP? No point - none of them can offer anything significantly better, nor is there any chance of ever getting cable in the vilage.

[australia rural internet is the worst in the world i reakon]

hey im Australian with Statlelite aInternet and omg its a rip off compared to adsl and is very very very slow

and atm its not even working and numberous calls to isp still no fix omg one week without internet is hell

no phone no internet no life for me

[watson]

an engineer came to my home and said i could get up to 4megs but the exchange always rations the amount . sure enough at present i get 1.34 megs. when you try to get something done by phone you get put on the india roundabout. complete waste of time.