LETTER: Superslow internet in Rotherham

SUPERFAST — you must be joking! Try smoke signals!

Whilst SFSY might be bragging about the internet connection speeds now available in the borough of Rotherham, that’s far from the whole picture!

Some of us poor souls in the borough still have a connection to our properties via BT’s old copper wire strung on poles along the street and with no other affordable or feasible option. That means, even with a nice new SFSY cabinet at the end of the street, at busy times for the internet the connection speed can be so slow that you cannot connect to anything via your router — even if you are a BT Broadband customer

Ironically, at times the service is so bad you can-t connect to check the connection speed in order to complain. NB the problem can’t be blamed on the PC as it applies to all of a ‘tower’ on ethernet, modern lap-top and modern tablets, unless the latter are used on costly 4G mobile link instead of wi-fi.

If anyone wanted to run a business from home, down-loading or up-loading ‘big’ files, well, unless you fancy doing that in the early hours of the morning, forget it!

Similarly, if you want to use Skype to contact people in other countries, as the latest version of Skype seems to need a higher connection speed than before, for most of your time, again, forget it!

It’s not an exaggeration to say that at times it would be faster to communicate using smoke signals than using the internet! Is this yet another example of  the reality of ‘The North’ being the ‘poor relation’ when it comes to infrastructure?

Disgusted of Dinnington.