BT is facing heavy criticism after businesses and households in the Shetland villages of Vidlin and Uyeasound were left without broadband for up to 30 hours during much of Wednesday and Thursday. The Shetland News claims it took BT nearly all of that time (24 hours) just to admit that the fault was at its end and not the customers'.

It's understood that similar network faults had affected rural villages at least eight times in 2006 and 2007, with BT investing £40,000 last year to fix the problems. BT has apologised for its "totally unsatisfactory" performance and once again promised to do better:


Unfortunately residents of such villages haven't just had to suffer from connectivity problems, with many only able to receive service speeds of 0.5Mbps (512Kbps), which is becoming increasingly unacceptable.