At last, BT is told to speed up its rural act

Like many other little communities across the country, my small Somerset village, comprising some 70 houses, has been following the latest twists in the battle for “faster broadband” with particular interest. Before long, the Government has promised that 95 per cent of Britain will have access to those fibre optic cables, which can provide speeds of 30 megabytes per second or much more. But therein lies the rub for the few million of us to whom this has seemed just an empty pipe dream.

In our own case, we used to battle with speeds of a mere 0.7 MBps, until we switched from BT to other suppliers, when we struggled up to 5 or 6, a level most city dwellers would regard as ridiculously slow. So, when we learned that villages all around us had been connected to fibre optic, we assumed salvation was at hand.

But the response from BT Openreach was that if we wanted fibre optic to be extended by just a mile from the next village, we would collectively have to pay £50,000. For each of the few prepared to buy into this exorbitant sum, the bill could be thousands of pounds.

The general view was that BT has become so obsessed with expanding its new empire of sporting coverage, films and mobile phones that it has lost sight of its original core function: to upgrade the infrastructure of cables and tunnels it inherited from public ownership, to provide all its customers with the same service.

Now, it seems, the CEO of Ofcom, Sharon White – the economist who was formerly permanent secretary at the Treasury – is preparing to take a much tougher line with BT and Openreach. We, the “dispossessed five per cent”, now live in hope that we can one day expect broadband speeds as good as those already enjoyed, with funding from the EU, by countries such as Lithuania and Latvia.