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You are here: Home > Business & Community News > Cumbria Connected BT 'quadruples' broadband speedsCumbria Connected trys to keep you up to speed with Digital Events in Cumbria.
What's happening in the digital industries?
What's going on with connectivity?
How can we be connected?
How can we comepete with the big cities? The latest from BTMuch is made of BT's commitment to Broadband services but it is behind its rivals in some areas. According the latest information from BT it is to increase its broadband speeds by up to four times from 31 March. I wonder how long that will take to filter through to rural area like Cumbria?
The company is promising that 78% of its users would be able to access at least four megabits per second (4Mbps), compared with the maximum of two available now. Almost half would get 6Mbps and those close to their local exchange would be able to access 8Mbps.
We welcome this news but can't help thinking "Who the hell is BT kidding?" Its commitment to giving rural Cumbria broadband only surfaced when a North West Development Agency backed project called "Project Access" brought £17 million to Cumbria via Your Communications (now owned by Thus) who were tasked with bringing broadband to the county and will achieve 95% access shortly. Locally we are lucky if we can get 1Mbps connection and villages like Great Urswick are stuck with 512 Kbps connections, half of the 1 Mbps that we can receive.
Some rival providers already offer up to 24Mbps, but their services are restricted mainly to clusters of users in big cities.
BT Insists more than 5,300 exchanges serving more than 99.6% of UK homes and businesses were being upgraded to support the higher speeds.
As well as making web browsing, e-mailing and file transferring quicker, higher broadband connection speeds mean people can do more with their net connection, such as watching video, listening to audio, and playing online games.
UK business is expected to compete with American firms in world markets and while the Americans and Japanese can connect at speed measured in Terrabits which is hundreds of times faster than our Megabit connections, we have. Uk Company therefore have to meet their competition with the snail like equivalent we are given and while we may be able to transfer files and emails faster than we could many do not realise that the higher speed is on one direction only, usually downstream or receive, the upstream or send speed is still only 256 Kbps normally.
The truth is - Had BT spent the money it wasted on attempted USA penetration with bad company purchases and speculation been on our Information and Communications Infrastructure we would not be having this conversation or connecting at such low speeds to the Internet.
Get your finger out BT!
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