Whaddon Broadband Survey—First Results

I would like to thank everyone around the village of Whaddon who responded to my requests and cajoling to test their broadband speeds. I heard from around 20 villagers; obviously this is not necessarily a statistically valid sample, but it is the best I am going to get. It is a well-known phenomenon that only a small cross-section of people will respond to such a request, and the people I have approached individually and deliberately are mostly those known to me and hence not a random sample.

For reasons of respecting everyone’s privacy, I do not give the locations of the test results I received back. Rather I have placed them approximately on a sketch map of Whaddon. The results show the upload and download speeds and the ISP of the respondents. It is very important that the following is read before looking at the map and my conclusions.

Most of the results are based on at most one or two individual tests, and of course only reflect the speeds at that precise moment. A variety of factors, in particular the load on the network at that time, can affect the results. Thus in cases where I have several readings I have averaged them somewhat. I gave everyone a choice of several speed testers, as not all work well on any one system. Since each tester uses a different system, this introduces a further element of variability, as does the manner in which the person running the test communicated the data to me. I also do not know the specified package that each person is getting from their ISP—some may be on slower speeds anyway. Thus there are a lot of caveats, but any data is better than nothing.

Now have a look at this map and read on.

No-one in the village is getting near 2000 kbs, never mind the '8mbs' which appears in adverts!. This is in accord with what we would expect, given that we are at the least 2.5 miles down the A1198 from the exchange at Arrington, at which point the DSL broadband which has been travelling very fast enters the copper wire leading to houses. The copper is of the course the weak link in the chain, as well as the uncertain one, since it is old, and of course none of us know the precise routes the copper takes through the village.

The results fall into several different groups. The upload speeds are fairly consistent, at about 240 kbs for most people, but with some of the faster lines giving figures up to 350 kbs. The download speeds are the most important number for most people, and we see three main groups, those about 450 kbs, another around 900 kbs, and then a third in the region of 1500 kbs.

Most but not all of the 450 group are at the extremities of the village, and this can to some extent be attributed to the distance of the houses from the Arrington exchange. But what is interesting is that there is no real pattern as to where the faster lines are, those in excess of 1100 kbs. It does not seem to correlate with distance, as otherwise we might expect the centre of the village to do best, and Meldreth Road to do the worst, which is not true. There are so many factors which might explain the discrepancies here: again, there is the quality and newness of the copper lines in question; there is the matter of how and where the lines are connected at the exchange; and there is the possibility that some ISPs may be able to put a higher quality signal out onto the BT backbone. I just do not know, but I can relate that Trilogy, in an attempt to speed up my own connection, changed the way the lines were connected at Arrington, and my speeds improved from about 900/240 to about 1200/340—but this is something which may only help original Trilogy customers such as myself.

Thus, by way of conclusion, I would say that I cannot simply suggest what speeds someone might get depending on where they are in the village, or indeed with what ISP. But I can say that none of us are getting the much-touted super-fast broadband speeds. There is regrettably going to be a town/country divide on this one, whatever the government and authorities say, as copper runs are longer in the country, and there is not the incentive for the commercial provider (BT) to do anything about it.

What of the future? There was a lot of discussion about UK broadband speeds in the media at the end of 2007. What might happen?

BT, who still run the national backbone down which we get our connections, is in the process of updating things to the so-called 21^st Century Network. They have started in Cardiff. It will probably be a couple of years at least before they get round to our part of the world (see earlier paragraph). This will include the ADSL 2+ technology which should enable broadband signals to travel further than at present, which also means that we might see some speed increases.

Eliminating the copper cables would provide the greatest speed increase, if they were then replaced by optical fibre, as signals travel so much faster down fibres than along metal. Lots of press articles have talked about this, and have drawn attention to the fact that the cost of laying fibre to every house would be so high as to make it impractical! One thing which would improve things, and which would not be quite so expensive, would be to take one large fibre from the exchanges to a distribution cabinet in the village, from which the copper would run to houses. Will that happen?

One does also read of other technologies which may be capable of pushing more data down the existing copper wires. Most are some way in the future. There is always the possibility that wireless connections may become more widespread, but I see that as a primarily urban possibility. Just compare mobile phone coverage in the countryside to see what I mean.

All this is dependent on BT and the ISPs spending money, something they do not like doing! Government has made pious statements about something needing to be done, but will anything happen? Your guess is as good as mine.

I will now put away my crystal ball. This survey has been most interesting, and I have met some new people as a result. Thanks again to everyone who contributed. I hope this has been of some interest.