How to get fast rural broadband

Having read Computeractive for many years and enjoyed letters on various topics, there seems to be so much focus on rural fast broadband. I’d like to share my own experience. When we moved into our village (Hunsdon, Hertfordshire) in 2006 we discovered that our broadband with BT was really non existent, because we were right at the end of the exchange in Much Hadham, about 3.5 miles away. We could only achieve a download speed of 1.5Mbps and upload speed of just 0.3Mbps. We had no other option but to accept it as there was no other ISP that could offer us any faster broadband.

Things got better when a company called Gigaclear ( www.gigaclear.com) asked residents whether they would be interested in a faster broadband service. They told us in a meeting in our village hall how long it would take. If there was enough interest they would start building the brand new fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network. Work started in April 2016 and was finally completed in May 2017. We were actually connected in September 2016. We have gone from 1.5Mbps with BT to 53Mbps with Gigaclear. It’s amazing that now we get more speed for free than we had when paying for it with BT. David King