Call for better rural connection
Coatesville residents are sick of slow internet speeds, connections that cut out and patchy mobile signal.
Coatesville Rates and Residents Association (CRRA) member Iain Graham is asking for residents keen to lobby for better communication services to put their names forward.
Graham runs a home-based internet business and has installed two separate connections to deal with the problem. He says many home businesses in the area rely on the internet.
‘‘My upload and download speeds are appalling,’’ he says.
‘‘[Both connections] keep dropping out, but because I rely on the internet, I’ve got to keep switching between the two to find out which one’s working well.’’
Graham uses a copper-to-thehouse ADSL connection and wireless rural broadband, which gives a connection to his home via an aerial on the roof.
Residents say they are frustrated at having to go through their internet service providers (ISP), in order to deal with Chorus, who own and maintain the copper line network.
Chorus communications manager Nathan Beaumont says Chorus has ’’invested heavily’’ in upgrading Coatesville broadband in the last few years.
The introduction of Rural Broadband Infrastructure (RBI) has given some residents the option to upgrade to VDSL - a faster version of ADSL.
Beaumont says connectivity issues are likely to be related to the distance residents live from the network exchange or cabinet they’re connected to. Broadband signal degrades outside of a six kilometre (km) radius from the cabinet. With VDSL, this decreases to around 1.5 km.
Copper lines are also vulnerable to wet weather, Spark senior communications partner Michelle Baguley says.
CRRA member Brian Hedley, who lives outside the recommended distance to his cabinet, cannot get VDSL and says he’s had about six instances of losing phone and internet in the past year. He says the cause is the same each time. ‘‘It’s the further boundary that’s the issue. We’re relying on an outdated, overloaded system,’’ he says.
Fibre has not been rolled out to Coatesville under the Government’s Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) scheme, apart from the school which received it as a priority user.