Better broadband internet connection

I have worked from home in Sydenham for 15 years, initially on 56 Kb/s and latterly on about 2Mb/s which is just about ok with only one user at a time. We have 10 Mb/s in our isolated rural retreat, which is much more pleasant.

Often I find 4G is faster so buy 20Gb a month and tether up.

Oddly BT Wifi with FON is sometimes faster in London.

Perhaps cable or fibre are not the answer.

In my experience, cheap price gets a cheap "service". BT attracted me as the 'flagship' carrier because cable offerings are not available in my location. I stayed with them despite diabolical reliability, variable access speeds and incomprehensible "support", in anticipation of vast improvement once fibre could be rolled out. When fibre was made available to us, I took the premium package because both I and my wife were starting to look at digital sources for all sorts of media, creating a clear demand for bandwidth.
I had been an early adopter of personal computing because of its benefits to my professional life in handling finances, collating data etc. and then embraced the internet for accessing information, communication etc. My wife was a reluctant adopter. In the days of 'dial up', she could not get to grips with it. As speed of access improved with availability of broadband she saw the benefits and has become a tyro. Broadband was an invaluable tool for advertising and communicating her Art Education business and is now providing a viable platform for displaying and selling her art.
Our family is becoming increasingly distributed around the globe so that we value enormously the benefits of Video telephony.
Our ability to research product information for buying decisions and 'how to do' has been transformed.
I was delighted with BT's broadband in year 1 but became increasingly disappointed, not through familiarity but because download speeds deteriorated steadily and upload speeds reduced to a crawl. BT made it very easy for me to test alternative suppliers because BT insisted that my renewal fee would be a multiple of what was on offer to new subscribers so I jumped ship. I have been with Zen, paying more than I did with BT but receiving broadband access speeds undreamed of before, for 18 months. I have not had to reboot the router more than a dozen times; with BT that had been a virtually daily occurrence. A critical improveme for Blog uploads.

Yes I am affected by poor internet speed. When I complain about this to my provider the speed increases for about 3-4 days then goes back down. As my husband works from home this is sometimes unacceptable. Broadband costs are too high for the service received, so yes they should be treated with importance as mostly everything is now digitally handled.

My flat is in SW London, got 53 Mb/sec(BT) via phone line, it's the max speed my phone line can handle. Tried to get a fibre connection with Virgin Media as it's available on my street, turns out my building is not connected. Virgin offered to connect the building for free and pretty quickly as well, but needed the approval of the people who actually own my building. Owner refused, even though Virgin explained the driveway will not be dug up, there will be no disruption to other residents. So i'm not able to get faster speeds, overall i'm happy though as the connection is very stable and i can stream quite well(4K sometimes goes to loading but hey).

Had a similar experience at the tech startup i used to work for in SW London, we used to get 2Mb/sec for an office of 20+ people. And sometimes it dropped for hours too. The street had fiber optic cable but only on the other side, our building wasn't connected. Terrible internet was one of the reasons the company ended up moving offices.

Still can't believe how bad the internet is in a huge capital like London. I'm originally from Romania and over there in pretty much all the bigger cities we can get up to 1000 Mb/sec download and 500 Mb/sec upload. And what does it cost? 39 Romanian Lei each month, roughly £7.3/month(and no line rental costs of course as it's via fiber optic cables). Why can't the UK invest in infrastructure to get at least a quarter of those speeds to homes and businesses? Surely they want businesses in the UK to prosper no? At this rate they keep struggling...
Check out Romanian internet speeds here: http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet-digi-net/fiberlink?t=internet-fix&pachet…

I can confirm that the notorious Rotherhithe "not spot" has seen no improvement over the last 6 years despite endless consultations. My phone line is still copper wire direct to the Bermondsey exchange on Lynton road about 2 miles away and therefore the maximum speed I can get is shameful for London zone 2 in 2018. I can't see any evidence that this is going to change anytime soon. Luckily I work for a company that is happy to provide me with a 4g dongle for work access.

There are so many new buildings in my street (Millharbour, London E14) but we are still unable to get high-speed fibre broadband! I check regularly on the Openreach checker (https://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/index.do) but always get the same message (= excuse):

"We're working with government and industry to explore ways to bring Superfast fibre to as many people as possible but don't have a plan for your area yet."

Exchange name: Canary Wharf
Exchange status: Fibre enabled
Cabinet number: -
Technology: Pending - EO Line

The map that you have attached here shows for my area the "Maximum download speed (mb)" is 0-10, which is the lowest!

This is not acceptable as there are a lot of people living in the area and many people will move there in the near future when the new buildings are finished. My building is less than 10 years old...get us into the 21st century!

I am unable to receive some services like BT Infinity, say, because the flats haven't got fibre yet. But BT can't be bothered to fix it. Which means I cannot work at home.

We are in a Virgin area, but I stuck with poor BT speeds for five years because of their website promises that would be upgrading our street to fibre within months. It never happened, so I had to switch to Virgin and pay almost £40 a month for just phone & fast broadband. A BT Openreach engineer later told me that there have never been any plans to upgrade our street and that it was now effectively company policy not to compete with Virgin in the London suburbs. Given that Virgin are now in a monopoly position in many London areas they should be forced to open up their network to other broadband companies,

I live in SE15, 2 miles from the City of London and have broadband speed worse than a developing country. My maximum download speed is 4mbps and upload of less than 1mbps. So weak that ADT refuse to install a house alarm that uses WIFI to allow phone connectivity. Its absolutely shameful that BT refuse to improve the cabling or put a new box in my street which is at the furthest point from the exchange. I have been pushing BT and Southwark Council and BT told me that I with my neighbours should raise £20k and that they would then fix the issue. So overall its terrible and I cant even get Fibre Optic or any other option because its all tied to the BT cable issues.

I work from home a lot and often need to send large files. The internet connection is OK but as I am 'too close' to an exchange I can't get very fast/fibre internet. Because of this I have had to supplement my BT service with a Mobile 4G provider.

I live in Peckham where my broadband speed with TalkTalk is never more than 1.3. Last month it dropped to 0.9 in the early morning - i.e. before most people had their devices up and running. About every 3 years I ask for someone to come out to check, as my neighbour has 3.4. Each time, I am told that "because I am connected to the Nunhead Exchange" my speeds are low. [It is true that I moved my telephone number with me when I moved from Nunhead to Peckham.] But these speeds are completely unacceptable. Each time I complain someone comes out to check, and each time they try to charge me £50 without telling me beforehand. I'm told that fibre optics isn't available in my area. Is there something that we can do together to get this rectified? 0.9 is totally unacceptable. I don't have a family, but I can imagine how frustrating it must be for parents who feel they have to cave in to children's demands for playing games and streaming live content. Let's do something!!

I also have very low speeds, despite being in Central London - W11. I daresay it's due to the number of connections feeding off the cabinet, even though it's only round the corner and I have had every single upgrade that BT can offer. There are complaints re rural broadband being slow or non-existent, but to get speeds of only 3Mbps in a leading global city is economically disastrous.

We have a Virgin Broadband contract and we pay a lot to guarantee that we have the speed that we need (both of us have work to do at home). Once we go out London, in the countriside, appalling services. Why rural people cannot have a decent broadband service without paying a lot?