Anger over internet speeds
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A STREET in Runcorn has one of the slowest internet speeds in the country, with residents having to wait 10 minutes to load their Netflix.
Average download speeds in Malmesbury Park, Sandymoor, crawl along at 0.54Mbps, according to a survey by price comparison company USwitch.
This speed, 100 times slower than the national average, puts the street 10th worst in ther country.
One resident, Amanda Day, said it was ‘an annoyance’.
She said: “There are dead spots. When the kids are home and everyone’s on their apps, it’s just annoying.
“You move to a different provider thinking you’re going to get a better service but it doesn’t make a difference.”
Another Malmesbury Park resident, who gave her name as Kate, said: “It’s a problem, absolutely. When you open
Netflix, for instance, it takes like 10 minutes to load.”
While the national average download speed is 54.2Mbps, some streets in the USwitch survey had download speeds of more than twice that, which the company’s broadband expert Dani Walker said highlighted a ‘digital divide’ in the UK.
She said: “Residents living on one side of a city can be struggling with broadband as slow as molasses, while people just miles away are enjoying ultrafast speeds.”
In the case of Malmesbury Park, the difference in speed can be a matter of yards rather than miles.
Superfast fibre broadband is available in the area, and some residents said they had ‘no problems’ with their internet, which was as fast as the national average.