We’re a rural family of six with three businesses on site and we have three landlines in order to be able to use broadband. It is a disaster – usually less than 1MB, peaks occasionally at 4MB – and sometimes the kids have to go to the village to do homework.
Why isn’t BT forced to enable rural homes with the same deals that city people get? BT wanted to charge £16,000 to connect us!
We have excellent 4G outside, but not inside, the house. June
BT isn’t forced to offer rural homes the same deals as city people because – as your £16,000 quote illustrates – it would cost too much. BT is busy extending its high-speed network to rural areas but the British government, via the DCMS’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) scheme, and local authorities are contributing to the cost.
For example, in Northern Ireland, where you live, BDUK has contributed £11.5m and local authorities £22m. That’s £500 per household for the 66,912 people who have signed up for BT’s new 24Mbps+ “superfast broadband”. It’s expensive because, while people may complain about broadband speeds, most of them don’t subscribe. (BT returns some of the public funding when more than 20% of potential customers adopt a service.)
Further, there is no universal service obligation (USO) because the government’s strategy makes it impossible. USO schemes can work when a monopoly can use profits from customers who are cheap to serve – those in large towns – to subsidise those who are expensive to serve, like you. But the government chose unregulated competition in urban areas, which leaves no surplus for the rural ones.
Last year, BT’s CEO Gavin Patterson made a “voluntary USO” offer that, he said, “would have allowed the last 5% of the UK to have a broadband product of at least – and I mean at least – 10 megabits per second by 2020, and do so in a way that allowed us to make a fair, not an excessive, return.” The scheme capped the cost at £3,400 per home, but the property owner could pay any excess. Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, declined. It will now come up with a “regulatory USO”, though there’s no indication how it plans to pay for it. (See UPD Gov Reject BT Voluntary 10Mbps UK Broadband USO and Goes Regulatory.)
Of course, the British government could deliver high-speed fibre to almost every building in the UK for a relatively small sum – perhaps around £13bn – but has been unable to find the cash since the idea was proposed in the mid-1980s. It would rather spend hundreds of billions on nuclear submarines, nuclear power stations and high-speed trains.
As a result, the superfast broadband roll-out will continue where subsidies make it financially viable, but it will never reach some remote users.
Instead, they will have to use 4G mobile broadband, fixed wireless (if available) or a satellite dish. One or more of those may solve your problem.
Test your lines?
If a line can sometimes deliver 4Mbps, it should be able to sustain it. There could be a problem in your house, such as interference on internal cables, cable faults, or a faulty router. It might be worth having an expert check your installation. (BT will check some of it for £129.99.)
There could also be faults in the BT cabling to your house, or the connections in the cabinet or the exchange. BT has an online troubleshooter that can help diagnose some faults, but Openreach – the division that maintains the network – should be able to find them.
Your broadband speeds may also be affected by congestion at the exchange. Broadband – like water and electricity – is delivered on the basis that not everyone will want to use it at the same time. If they do, there isn’t enough to go around.
Try logging your speed at different times of day, and in different types of weather, to see if there is a correlation. If there’s a techie in the house, the ping and traceroute utilities can help with trouble-shooting.
I understand you already have both BT and Talk Talk broadband, but it’s worth keeping an eye on your local exchange to see if any other services become available. Just enter your village’s name, or your postcode, phone number or exchange code, at Sam Knows.
Bonding and balancing
Technically, it’s possible to combine two or more lines to create a single “bonded ADSL” broadband service, but hardly any ISPs support it. Another idea is to use a load-balancing or dual-WAN router. For example, a Draytek V2832N Vigor 2832n will convert two ADSL2 lines and a 3G/4G router into a single system. (And a Vigor 2860 would support two 3G/4G routers.)
This should smooth out variable connection problems and avoid dropped connections, unless all the services go down at the same time.
Wireless looks best
If you can get 4G close to the house then you may be able to get up to 40Mbps inside, for a reasonable price. I covered this last year in Can I give up my landline and use 4G broadband?
For example, Three’s HomeFi service offers 40GB for £24 per month, with a free router on a 12-month contract. If you run out, a 10GB top-up costs £20.
EE, which is owned by BT, offers even better value for heavy users: 100GB of data for £45 per month, or 200GB for £60 per month. If you sign an 18-month contract, there are no up-front costs. With no contract, you pay £99.99 for the 4GEE home router.
You could also buy your own router and just buy data sims when you need them.
Aerials and repeaters
You should get good 4G performance indoors if you install an external LTE aerial such as the Solwise 4G-XPOL, as long as there’s an aerial socket on your router.
There are, of course, other ways to boost the signal. You have not been able to use them legally because Ofcom classed mobile repeaters as “radio apparatus” under the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006. However, some became legal on 12 April under the Wireless Telegraphy (Mobile Repeater) Regulations 2018 exemption, with the proviso that transmitters can only be used indoors.
Cel-Fi is already selling one.
Fixed Wireless Access
There are various fixed wireless access (FWA) services that could easily provide broadband to large areas of rural Britain, but they have been sadly neglected. Wimax is one example. Still, there are almost a hundred wireless ISPs listed at ISPreview, and many readers will be able to find a local one.
Your best bet seems to be Beacon Broadband, which is based in Derry, and which is just rolling out services. It offers unlimited packages for £25 to £65 per month, and a £45 20Mbps business package would meet your needs, if Beacon can handle your location. The setup involves installing a dish, usually on the side of your house.
Otherwise, two-way satellite services are the option of last resort, and they should be available everywhere. They have two major problems: latency and cost. The latency problem is that actions can be “laggy” because of the delay while a signal travels to the satellite and back. As for costs, check the options at a leading supplier such as Avonline. Prices range from £19.95 for 5GB per month to £149.95 for 150GB per month.
Have you got a question? Email it to Ask.Jack@theguardian.com