Are you adequately served by your broadband internet connection?
Many residents of Haddenham have a rather flakey internet connection, with very variable transfer speeds. The editor of this website experiences complete drop-outs several times a day, and others have reported excruciatingly slow upload speeds when sending attachments. The latter has major negative implications for local businesses which need to send out large attachments with their communications.
The broadband connection for the vast majority of us uses a technology called ADSL (short for "asymmetric digital subscriber line") which, by definition, provides slower upload speeds than downloads – that's the "asymmetric" bit. But uploads in Haddenham can show serious "latency" problems (delays before anything starts to happen) and overall speeds can drop to well under 5% of the download speeds. This can lead to problems with services such as BBC iPlayer, which require efficient two-way links to maintain smooth and seamless buffering – otherwise, users experience frustrating pauses or technical hiccups in the programmes they are trying to watch online.
If you only use the internet for simple and occasional email correspondence, you may not be concerned with this. But for those who wish to make use of 'TV on demand' and film streaming facilities for leisure, and for local businesses needing fast and reliable broadband connections to run their operations efficiently, the current broadband provision is inadequate.
It's all the more frustrating to realise that just a few miles away, in Thame, residents and businesses have the latest fibre-optic broadband service available.
But the same could be true for Haddenham, if enough people express an interest. So please do so!
It costs nothing to register your desire for faster and more reliable broadband services – and the more local people who do so, the quicker and more likely it is that we will benefit from a technical project currently being rolled out by BT across Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. Rural villages will be well down the priority list unless residents and local businesses register.
Please register now ... to do so, click here.
