BT offers broadband to couple for £45,000

Posted on 8 Feb 2010 at 16:36

When Mr and Mrs Walker, who run a guest house in Cumbria, wanted to upgrade to broadband they thought it would be a relatively easy and cheap process. Little were they expecting BT's response that the service would cost £45,000 to install, despite other villagers already having broadband.

For this amount of money the Walkers could surely expect a super-fast connection, but they were only offered 512Kbit/s download speeds - the same as the rest of the village. BT said that the problem was that there was no more capacity for broadband in the area and fulfilling the Walker's request would require installing new equipment.

BT generously offered to pay £8,000 of the costs, leaving the couple to come up with the remaining £37,000 themselves.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Mr Walker has accused BT of abusing its network monopoly (it owns the network infrastructure) because had switched phone supplier and was going to use a different broadband supplier.

"“We just want the same crap broadband service as everybody else in the village but BT won’t even let us have that," Mr Walker told the Telegraph.

Perhaps Mr Walker should apply for the BT chairman's job, as the company recently gave Sir Michael Rake broadband at a cost of £168,000. This made him the only person in the village of Hambleden with broadband. As a member of a new high speed internet trial, you can bet Sir Michael gets slightly more than 512Kbit/s.

Author: David Ludlow

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