You may have heard about this in the news recently, but some research has been published into areas which get poor broadband access. These areas are described as ‘not spots’, rather than ‘hot spots’.
The common assumption would be that these ‘not spots’ are in quieter, rural areas, however the findings show that even streets in major towns can get poor connection speeds. A lot of the ‘not spots’ are within commuter belts, so a lot of people are getting connection speeds of less than 2mbps.
By 2012 the Government have planned for every household to be able to get download speeds of at least 2mb. To achieve this, an exchange needs to be within 4km of the house that uses it for it’s broadband connection.
50% of the exchanges in Basingstoke are over 6km from the houses they supply broadband to and around 25% of homes in Hampshire struggle to even get speeds of 1mb. Now, though these speeds are slow, I’d rather be in this percentage than the 1% of homes that cannot receive any broadband at all. The problem is, that to achieve higher speeds, broadband companies will need to spend more money on better infrastructures and they do not believe that it is economically beneficial at the moment.
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