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How fast is your Broadband?, mine's buffering slow!

I love living in the English countryside, but I can’t help thinking I’m stuck in the dark ages when it comes to Internet connectivity speed. 

Our house is in a small village in Oxfordshire. We have no street lights, no mains drainage, and we even have a traditional red telephone box next to the cricket pitch. We also have our power and telephone lines carried overhead by telegraph poles. This sounds all very quaint, but when we have a storm or a heavy snow fall, the power and phones get knocked out and it’s time to break out the candles and thermal underwear. However, it’s a different story just a few miles down the road in modern suburbia. There it may be less picturesque, but one thing they do have is underground fibre optic cables delivering upto 50 megabit straight into their homes. That’s more than 10 times what we have!

During the daytime I’ve had up to 3Megabit, but in the evening this often drops below 1 Megabit. This is probably when all our neighbours jump on their computers, and the available bandwidth gets a hammering, making bandwidth thirsty sites like you tube or BBC Iplayer a buffering nightmare. It appears however we are lucky when compared to some rural parts of the UK, where it’s not uncommon to get only 512K or even worse…dial up! 

So what’s the answer? This is the 21st century after all, surely we have the available technology to do better!

I read about a few things I could do to get the best out of my connection. Firstly I installed a broadband accelerator in the master box to try and max up the incoming signal, and this did give me a few K more, then to get the best connection and available speed, I mainly use a wired connection straight to the modem rather than surf via the WIFI, I’ve only got 802.11G, but I guess 802.11N may help a bit more if I need to use the wireless. However the main issue with my current speed is the distance between my house and telephone exchange and apparently I’m near the end of the line, so the connection is almost out of puff before it gets to me.

Next I looked at the service itself. I looked into cable services, but the cable companies who lay fibreoptic cables are not about to dig up the roads to supply a few houses in our village, as the maths just doesn’t work. Then I looked at wireless services deployed over the mobile phone network such as 3G, but in my area we have a sporadic cell phone signal that drops out if the wind blows the wrong direction! Finally, I looked at satellite broadband, but I’m not likely to get much more speed than I’ve currently got and it, and it would cost me more.

I have heard that BT Infinity by British Telecom, where thinking of deploying fibre optic cable along side, or to replace the regular telephone lines carried over head by telegraph poles? I like this idea!!!!, no digging up roads, easy deployment and 21st century speeds, this sounds like a no brainer to me. If it’s true, when will they roll it out, and whose butt do I have to kiss to get this down our lane? Until then, we’re stuck with snail speed.

I’d love to hear about your broadband experiences around the world, is it a similar situation where you live?, I understand that in some parts of Asia, 100Megabit connections is common!, what are your views on solutions for rural areas?

DesignSpark Team Geek Dad, Blogger, Gadget Junkie, Technology Evangelist. DesignSpark Team. twitter - @petenwood
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