So the government <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8362153/Superfast-broadband-plans-get-50m-government-boost.html" target="_blank">is to slap down £50 million</a> to help kickstart broadband into every community in Britain, including little rural places like the spot on the North Downs where I live.

Here's George Osborne, the Chancellor, announcing it, 'Broadband is crucial    for the country’s economic future; that’s why the coalition Government is    investing over half a billion pounds in its infrastructure.
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'We want to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015 and    today’s £50m will benefit up to 800,000 homes and businesses. This is very    much a locally-driven process and we encourage bids from all local people    with plans for improving broadband in their local area.'

A word in your shell-like, George. You may hand out that money to the fat cats of the telecom industry. But if you do make sure they actually deliver, won't you? Cue a cautionary tale...

<!--more-->Five years ago when I was running the web site for the <a title="Saved" href="http://davidhewson.com/standalones/saved/">save-wye campaign</a> I was paying £100 a month for a crappy satellite broadband connection that capped my monthly bandwidth to 1 gb and throttled everything after that. I didn't have any choice. There was no broadband on our village exchange and even expensive ISDN -- 64K! -- didn't cut it.

Those kind people at BT said we could have broadband if we clubbed together and paid them £15,000 to put the equipment in the local exchange. Eventually Kent County Council shelled out to install it. So we could get ADSL, but only from BT and its resellers, since BT had the monopoly on the exchange.

It started off at a 2mb connection. Later that rose to 'up to 8mb'. If you were lucky. The problem is, you see, we may have ADSL in the exchange, but we also have copper telephone wires that haven't been upgraded in donkey's years. The voice quality on many lines hereabouts is so poor you're better off on a mobile call (if you can get a signal).

Broadband speed? Totally depends on where you are and what the line is like. I have two lines into this place, one for business, one, the older one, for private use. The business one, installed at great expense when ADSL turns up, chugs along at a steady 6mb and has pretty clear voice quality. The older voice line is incredibly crackly and is lucky to get a 3mb connection. <em>Both come into the house through the same cable.</em>

The pub restaurant up the road, the excellent Timber Batts, has a phone line so crackly they sometimes struggle to hear customers, and a net connection struggling at 2mb. And they're <em>nearer</em> to the exchange than I am. So it's nothing to do with distance.

What happens when you complain to BT about the state of the wires? They um and aah and say... it 'meets their minimum standards'. So crappy are the lines they usually go down for a week or more once or twice a year. Every time the engineers come out they say, 'This lot should have been replaced years ago.'

But BT, who have a monopoly around here, as they do in many small exchanges, just can't be bothered.

So give them all that money if you like, George. But make sure they pass the benefits onto their customers, and don't just put a load of flashy new equipment in the exchange that's no use to man nor beast.

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