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Broadband survey
The results of the broadband survey are in. Basically, very few people responded, and that seems to be because most people seem pretty happy with their service. This came as a surprise to me, until I realised that I have by far the worst service in the whole area!
I found the Broadband Availability checker produced some interesting results showing a great inequality in service available within North Middleton. Try it here. It’s fun putting in people’s phone numbers and finding out how good or bad a service they can get :-)
This limited research shows that within a single postcode, i.e. Cleuch Road (EH23 4RB), over the space of 200 metres, the speed of broadband available (ADSL Max) varies from 0.25Mbps to 8Mbps. That is a difference of over 30-fold. Mr Fast and Mr Slow will still pay exactly the same amount for their service. That’s like paying the same council tax as your neighbour and getting your bins emptied once a year instead of once a fortnight. The Cleuch Road situation is shown below. The diagram is to scale, being traced from a map.
The rest of the village appears to vary from 1 to 4Mbps. Whether you get a fast service or not is a bit of a lottery. However, for most purposes, 1Mbps is still quite reasonable.
If you want to check your actual speed again, you should first try the checker recommended by BT Wholesale (http://speedtester.bt.com). That is often a bit flaky, so it is worth giving this one a shot too: http://www.speedtest.net/
(10/11/07)
UPDATE!!!
My problem with broadband got taken up by high level complaints at BT and the trouble was traced to damage on the overhead cable caused by tree branches. That section of cable was replaced and I’m now enjoying high speed internet access. Woohoo!!!
(25/02/08)
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