Rural Shropshire bogged down with slow broadband speeds

Slow broadband speeds can be such a pain. When you’re stuck with a broadband connection that offers less than stellar speeds, you can spend (or rather, waste) minutes and even hours just staring at your screen, waiting for something to load or for your download to finish.

Maybe your broadband service provider isn’t delivering you the service that they have promised, or maybe outages or network errors have caused your connection to be slower than usual. However, it could also be because of the virtual rush hour, which was found to be around 7 to 9 in the evening. A research conducted has found that it is during this time range that most people in the UK go online. As a result of wrestling for bandwidth and due to high data demands and loads on servers, many users experience a subsequent drop in their broadband speeds.

Aside from the hassle, slow broadband speeds also have a negative effect in commerce and for establishments. Overall, broadband connection speeds in the UK has improved, but not enough to rank the country higher in the recent Akamai State of the Internet report. It was found that the UK still lagged behind other global hotspots, ranking 27th when it came to average connection speeds at 5 Mbps.

A lot of rural areas in the country still experience difficulty and slow connection speeds. Residents in Norwich had earlier complained about poor broadband services by Virgin Media which began in August.

Another area has now come forward with complaints on slow broadband speeds. Thousands of users and residents in rural Shropshire still only have access to crawling speeds despite a pledge of £8 million from the government to upgrade the Internet services in the county.

Shropshire councillor for Worthen and Chirbury, Councillor Heather Kidd, said that the connections in the rural areas of south Shropshire was “terrible.” She also said that government funding to the council was “woefully inadequate.” Although the Shropshire Council was given £8.2 million as part of the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) project, Kidd explained that it was not enough and that many areas in Shropshire still did not have access to basic broadband.

Kidd said: “When you compare it with other counties this is woefully inadequate. Cornwall for example applied, and received, £132m in total to upgrade the county’s telephone lines to fibre optics. What is worse is that they have also failed to motivate partners such as BT to invest much in the process. They are simply not interested in rural Shropshire as there is too little business in it for them. I have spoken to farmers who have to come to the broadplace in Chirbury to fill out forms for Defra because they cannot access the internet at home.”

Councillor Richard Huffer added that businesses in the area were suffering, stating: “The reason this is so important is the impact that this is going to have on businesses large and small in rural areas of the county. Technology does not stand still and, for a business to remain competitive, it must have access to the latest broadband.”

Source: Shropshire Star