Purbeck Broadband

If you are a resident of Purbeck (particularly if you are on the Corfe Castle or Worth Matravers telephone exchanges, though the problems may be more widespread) and are experiencing problems with your broadband connection (mainly fluctuating and inconsistent download speed at random times of the day and night, recently made worse by severe packet loss during afternoons and early evenings), and you wouldn’t mind your name being included in a complaint/report to the BT Chairman’s office, please get in touch either via email to info@purbeckbroadband.co.uk or the contact form.

Our ISP, Fast.co.uk, is willing to log a complaint/report with the BT Chairman’s office on our behalf on the issues we’ve been having with our broadband connections in the last seven months (we have supplied lots of evidence and hundreds of speed tests etc. in that time). But to give the complaint/report more weight, they would like to hear from other Purbeck residents who are having similar problems. The more residents who come forward and put their names to the complaint/report the more likely it is that BT will take it seriously. As things stand we have reached an impasse: our ISP can’t do anything more because BT Wholesale refuse to acknowledge that there is an underlying problem with broadband performance/speeds in some areas of Purbeck.

So, if you are as fed up as us with the quality of your broadband connection and want to help us try to do something to improve it, please get in touch. The more the merrier, as it were. A little community action and we might get this sorted before Christmas!

Download speed and throughput are fluctuating again today. I’m also seeing packet loss. Nothing new then.

Just to let regular visitors to Purbeck Broadband know that lack of updates from us doesn’t mean that all is fine. I experience fluctuating download speed and throughput at various times throughout the day – it is rarely consistently fast. We tend to only add an update to the blog when things are worse than “normal”.

I’m currently seeing almost 100% packet loss to some websites while others seem to load perfectly (like Purbeck Broadband). Sites that aren’t loading include Twitter (pinged: 85% packet loss, site not loading), Facebook and the New York Times (pinged: 100% packet loss, site not loading). Anyone else having problems accessing certain websites? There was a similar issue a couple of days ago – it affected both Worth and Corfe but fixed itself after 30 minutes or so.

I’ve also been having the usual problems with wildly fluctuating download speeds most of the Easter weekend.

Update 9:25 p.m.: Still no improvement – I cannot access a number of websites because of severe packet loss. My download speed has also nosedived in the last 20 minutes. I suspect this issue is affecting other households but it’s difficult to get any confirmation at this time on a Bank Holiday.

Update 10:38 p.m.: I hope I’m not tempting fate, but things seem to have returned to “normal”. It’s doubtful we’ll get to know what caused this latest issue – it wouldn’t surprise me if it was related to the problems we’ve been having in this area for the last several months. Download speed remains inconsistent.