Rural Norfolk Village Complains of BT’s Falling Broadband Speeds

Representatives of a small rural village in East Norfolk (England), Wiveton, have spoken to ISPreview.co.uk about their frustration after local broadband download speeds collapsed from around 6Mbps at Christmas to less than 2Mbps now. Some are even suffering speeds as low as 39Kbps and this includes a few living just yards from the exchange.

The village is home to around 160 people and connects to the nearby BT telephone exchange at Cley, which is predominantly only capable of offering broadband speeds of ‘up to’ 8Mbps (ADSL Max) to the local community.

Some FTTC (up to 80Mbps) is apparently available to parts of Cley’s coverage, but none of the Wiveton numbers that we checked against could receive it.

Godfrey Sayers, Chairman of Wiveton Parish Council, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Most in the village have had download speeds of around 6mb until Christmas 2014, but since then they have dropped to less than 2mb, and in some cases to as low as 39k and this is for people situated just yards from the exchange.

Being unable to obtain any contact details for the exchange the Parish Council posted a letter on the exchange door (a month ago) for the attention of the manager, outlining the problem many villagers face. This was taken by an engineer the same day, since then we have heard nothing.”

Sadly it wouldn’t be the first time that the Cley exchange has suffered performance problems and indeed we reported on a similar situation back in 2011 (here), which noted how BT had only provided a small amount of capacity for the area (a single 10Mbps link was being shared between around 400 local premises). In the end BT did agree to perform an upgrade and local speeds improved.

Naturally the demand for Internet data has continued to climb and sooner or later even Cley’s surrounding communities might need another upgrade, although at this stage it’s not clear whether the current problems are related to a shortage of capacity or a technical fault. We contacted BTOpenreach about the issue last week, but so far they have failed to provide a response and we will update if that ever changes.

The local Better Broadband for Norfolk project, which currently aims to make BT’s “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) service available to 90% of local premises by the end of 2015, is separately looking at whether or not to include the village into its new Phase 2 Superfast Extension Project (here).