BT Slams uSwitch Slowest Broadband Speed Claims

BT has refuted a claim by uSwtich that Cromarty Road in Stamford is Britain’s slowest street for broadband in the UK.

According to the uSwtich Broadband Speed Tracker, the Lincolnshire street received an average download speed of just 0.132Mbps, more than 500 time slower than the UK’s fastest road, which was Willowfield in Telford. uSwitch’s data was acquired from speed tests on uSwitch.com, and found that Lincolnshire had three of the slowest streets in the UK, while Essex had four.

uSwitch has said that its research highlights flaws in the government’s superfast broadband strategy, but BT has called the findings “inaccurate” and “misleading” and that residents of Cromarty Road have had average speeds of at least 10Mbps for at least a year.

Rural broadband speed claims

“The massive discrepancy between the fastest and slowest streets in Britain shows what the Government is up against in its fight to drag Britain into the broadband fast-lane,” said Julie Stent, broadband expert at uSwitch. “These results show just how ambitious it is being in its bid to overtake the rest of Europe and haul Britain in line with the likes of South Korea and Singapore by bringing super-fast broadband to 90 percent of the UK.”

Stent said that the government’s policy was geared towards urban areas, and that rural parts of the UK were receiving speeds so slow, “they might as well have no broadband at all.”

“However, most of Britain’s slowest streets for broadband are not in particularly remote areas, but in small towns, nearer to exchanges and where we would expect to see higher download speeds across the board,” she added. “Part of the problem is that Government funding for super-fast broadband is being dished out to councils, who don’t necessarily have a full view of the big picture.”

BT denies claims

The government has said that its aim is to have the best broadband in Europe by 2015 and has pledged to support the rollout of superfast broadband in areas where it is not commercially viable to do so.  Up to £530 million is available to councils under the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) scheme, although BT has won every contract up for grabs.

“Once again the uSwitch survey seems to be inaccurate and very misleading,” a BT spokesperson told TechWeekEurope. “The cabinet serving Cromarty Road, Stamford – which they have identified as Britain’s slowest street – has in actual fact been enabled for fibre broadband for more than a year now and so local residents can enjoy very high speed broadband.”

“Our data shows that customers in this street who have chosen BT Infinity have a line speed capability of around 40Mbit/s and those on BT Total Broadband an average of 10Mbps,” they added.

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