‘Woeful’ state of broadband

SIR, – Ken Gow is spot on regarding the woeful state of broadband provision in Scotland. I say “elastic band” because the pronouncements from BT, the Scottish and the UK Governments stretch my credulity.

With the help of a neighbour, I organised a survey of every household in my local exchange area.

Analysis of the returned questionnaires showed that over 50 premises in the area farthest from the green cabinet receive a download speed of 0.9 Mbps.

We are included in the statistics for receiving high-speed fibre broadband because the fibre does run to the cabinet.

Of course, we are all far too far down the copper lines for that to make any difference at all.

In fact, as those nearer the cabinet start using their higher speeds to download higher volumes of data, our speeds will slow down even more. There are no concrete plans for anything to be done about the situation.

Satellite broadband is unreliable and useless for those with high-data volume requirement and please don’t say mobile broadband as my postcode barely gets a usable voice signal. Of course, we have to accept that we are in a remote area being a few miles from the largest whitefish and the largest pelagic fishing ports in Europe, not to mention being within sight of the gas terminal that supplies 25% of the UK’s gas.

The Scottish Government have £42million left over from their last broadband roll-out.

Please spend it on putting in more cabinets/exchanges to help those at the bottom of the heap.