Rural broadband issues
If you live in the countryside or a more rural area, you may well experience problems in receiving Broadband. This is usually down to limited or a complete lack of infrastructure, so the further away you are from other houses and residents, the more difficulty you’ll have in getting broadband and, if you are able to get broadband at all, it will probably be incredibly slow and way slower than the speeds advertised.
Although you should be able to get broadband if you have a working BT phone line, which accounts for more than 98% of UK households, there are areas where the lines are so slow that it just isn’t possible to get a standard broadband line. This means that you will have to look at an alternative means of provision, such as wireless or satellite broadband.
Broadband speeds are defined by how much of your speed is going over the traditional copper phone lines and the further the signal must travel, the weaker it becomes. Slow speeds on broadband can be grouped into three main issues: -
1. Your distance from the phone exchange
2. Phone exchanges using old technology
3. Lack of competition from LLU providers (Local Loop Unbundling), which is the process of opening a telephone exchange so that it can be used by several different broadband providers. These broadband providers are then able to use connections from the telephone exchange through to the customer's homes to deliver home broadband.
Standard broadband is provided entirely over telephone lines, which is why your distance from the exchange determines your attainable speed. Most exchanges are located in built up areas and town centres, so if you are on the edge of a town or are in the countryside with miles between yourselves and the exchange, you will get a noticeably slower speed than if you were in closer proximity, you may receive less than 1Mb per second instead of the advertised speed. Some areas are still using the ancient ADSL with speeds topping 2Mb meaning that rural homes are even more likely to get slower speeds than urban homes.
Another issue is the lack of competition in more rural areas. LLU’s can install their own equipment in exchanges, which may offer faster speeds and a more reliable service but will only do so if it is economically viable. Bigger towns and cities will have many LLU providers competing with their own equipment, rural areas will usually only have one or two, and in the remotest of areas none!
Rural Fibre broadband
These are also not without their issues. There are two main areas of worry: -
1. Slow speeds caused by the distance from your street cabinet
2. Lack of infrastructure
The most commonly available type of fibre broadband is only part fibre. This is known as FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) and means that the fibre optic cables run to the cabinet nearest to your location, but then traditional copper cables complete the connection from the cabinet to your home, meaning that again your speeds are achieved by how far away from the cabinet your premises is.
In more rural areas, homes are not as tightly packed as they are in towns and cities, so one cabinet may cover a relatively large geographical location, even though it may well have just as many lines attached to it. This means that the line lengths tend to be longer in rural areas.
Upgrading to Rural 4g
4g is not just for smartphones, it also offers one of the best broadband solutions for more remote and rural properties, even where mobile reception is still poor.
4g is the name given to signals transmitted by mobile networks over mobile phone masts which are connected to the wider internet. They are the same as the signals used my smartphones to give you access to the internet on your mobile when you are on the move, meaning you do not need to rely on cables or fibre. With the correct equipment, 4g can be almost immediately installed to give you a fast and reliable broadband solution for your property.
Bink Broadband will soon be rolling out our 4g-service meaning you will have the ability to get online with genuinely fast speeds, even in areas where smartphones currently only get a very weak signal. 4g is increasing by the day and can offer broadband speeds of up to 25Mbs to homes right across Wales.
In fact, even the UK’s government has agreed that 4g offers the only real broadband alternative for rural areas where fibre is not available or is too slow. We will be rolling out our 4g services as soon as possible so please leave us your details so we can contact you when all is ready to go.
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