Long line issues – makes you appreciate good broadband when you have it

This is Lincolnshire broadband week on trefor.net. Most of the posts have been pretty upbeat. Feelgood stuff about how superfast broadband has changed life/work for the better. Well it ain’t all good I’m afraid. Businessman David MacGregor tells us about his long line issues – broadband so slow as to be almost unusable.

Working and living with a 0.18Mbps connection (…on a good day) is beyond ridiculous. Trust me when I say Broadband rage is real thing. My other half Kirsty and I run a small business (Terranomade) making and designing vinyl graphics, signs, wall art, stickers etc. from our small-holding just outside Theddlethorpe. It never ceases to amaze me that we have managed to grow the business as much as we have, with such limited internet access. Previously we have had some reasonably high profile clients, and attempting to draft and discuss previews and mock-ups via email, whilst operating on such a painfully slow connection speed, has very nearly cost us contracts and further commissions. As you can maybe imagine, in a competitive market place, speed is quite often the key. We genuinely feel as though we are losing business as a direct result of our internet speed issue.

As previously mentioned, one of the main problems with a slow connection is obviously downloading and sending attachments. A considerable portion of our day is spent waiting on pictures uploading, which eats into the time that should be spent on other projects and before you know it you find yourself still working at 9pm at night and thinking I wish I had got more done today.

Quite often friends will ask if we’ve watched some series or another on Netflix or its ilk, and then the quietly embarrassing conversation of “No, we can’t get Netflix etc” ensues. No-one ever quite believes that a connection speed of 0.18mbps is even possible. So, we never get to use on-demand services that’s just a huge no no! Hell, even to watch a 2 minute video on YouTube it takes 10mins and three attempts to get it to play all the way through whilst “buffering”. We have a rule of only one person connected to the internet at a time, primarily because if we are both attempt to go on ebay or facebook we spend the night getting messages of “no internet”.

We are currently awaiting an investigation being completed by BT as to what can be done to improve not only our connection, but also that of the six other houses along our road that are in the same boat. According to Openreach we are some 9.5km down the line and our cabinet has been fibre enabled, which is all well and good, but due to the length of the copper line, it has meant no improvement whatsoever. In the three years of living here our line speed has in fact has become considerably worse. When we first moved in we were lucky enough to get almost 0.35Mbps at times, now, due to more houses or line degradation, we are subjected to a pitiful 0.18Mbps.

Tref writes:

Remember the days of the 56k modem. You’d set something going and walk off to make a cup of tea whilst it downloaded. Might even set it going overnight and hope that it didn’t crash in the wee small hours making you have to start again. Well for some people this is still a reality as David can testify.

Other posts in Lincolnshire broadband week:

Tim Mackintosh gets excited http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/13/ultra-high-speed-broadband-uses/

There’s tiles in them thar clouds http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/13/cloud-storage/

Superfast translation http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/12/superfast-speeds-superfast-translation/

No more commuting to Budapest by composer Ervin Nagy http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/12/broadband-replaces-commute/

Philip Little of Bluecube Move to the cloud accelerated by superfast broadband http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/12/cloud-services-in-lincolnshire/

Intro to day 4 by Tref http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/12/today-on-trefor-net-how-people-are-using-their-new-superfast-broadband-connection/

Broadband for all by Tref http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/11/broadband-for-all-our-rights-to-access-utilities/

Could we have a B4RN in Lincolnshire (B4RL) http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/11/broadband-for-all-our-rights-to-access-utilities/

Gigaclear Ultrafast broadband in Lincolnshire by CEO Matthew Hare http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/10/gigaclear-ultrafast-broadband-in-lincolnshire/

BT fibrebroadband Managing Director Bill Murphy discusses superfast broadband progress in Lincolnshire http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/09/bt-superfast-broadband-lincolnshire/

Lincolnshire broadband programme update by Steve Brookes http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/09/lincolnshire-broadband-programme-update/