Neil Croft campaigned to get his local village telephone exchange upgraded for ADSL broadband. But when the village was hooked up, Mr Croft found he lived too far away to actually get it himself.
"I am a senior consultant for one of the UK's leading technology service companies, managing projects around the country, so the ability to be able to work from home would be an enormous boost to my productivity.
I am also a serious geek with five computers of my own at home plus my wife's laptop.
All these machines access the internet. My wife works with adults with learning disabilities and does a lot of work creating PowerPoint presentations for educational and communication purposes.
She is always looking for clipart and animations which are rarely small files.
Whilst where we live is not that remote - we can see the M18 from our bedroom window - we like to shop online to save driving the car.
As well as a fast connection, I really want the "always on" element of ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line) broadband.
Kick in the guts
When BT announced their ADSL exchange registration scheme in our area, we were very excited.
I immediately registered broadband4maltby.co.uk (now defunct), and together with two other locals, we started our campaign to get enough people interested to get the exchange upgraded.
We posted leaflets through letterboxes, asked shops to put posters in their windows, put posters on lampposts, and we had a service provider pay to put leaflets in the local free press.
I badgered the local press to print articles, but most of those attempts were unsuccessful.
I also lobbied the local and parish councils and local MPs.
Our campaign started around June 2002 and we got the exchange upgraded on 21 May 2003. We were over the moon.
But when I placed my order, it was rejected.
I complained to a publicity contact I had at BT Wholesale who passed me on to an incredibly helpful lady at broadband deployment.
The line checker told me I lived too far away from the telephone exchange, so I could not get the service I campaigned for.
I contacted a friend at BT who I knew, and he confirmed that my line records said I was too far away.
I felt like I had been kicked in the guts.
After some badgering, a Precision Test Officer was eventually sent out to check the line, which was worse than the line records indicated.
Extension hope
As one of the houses behind mine could get ADSL, I waited until he had ordered it and I had seen it working.
Then I ordered a new telephone line to be installed in my other neighbour's garden shed fed from the pole which was nearer the exchange.
I installed an extension down the length of my garden to the shed and put a new socket in my house.
So sure was I that I would get ADSL this route, I even purchased a router for £150 to connect my network at home.
Imagine my dismay when not only did this new line fail the line test, but the reason was the because the exchange-side wire pair took a different route to my enabled neighbour.
There were no spares in the short route and BT were not prepared to swap my pair with a shorter pair.
BT has announced a couple of trials this month, some long-reach equipment in Milton Keynes and some wireless trials at four locations around the UK.
If these are successful, cost-effective and widely deployed quickly, then I think it is a start at trying to find alternative means of getting broadband to people in my situation.
But by 2005, a 512kbps connection will seem incredibly slow compared to much of the world.
BT do not appear - publicly at least - to have much of a strategy for increasing the available bandwidth to anyone other than those living next to the exchange car park.
ADSL is already "old" technology, and BT or whoever really need to be looking to replace the local loop with something a bit more 21st century.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3334033.stm
Topic: Broadband so near yet so far (Read 785 times)