Am I destined to be stuck on 1Mb Slowband forever?

[#1]

Has their been any developments on rural broadband? I do feel that 3G or even 4G might be the future for me, but that means leaving plusnet, but at least I can finally rip my copper phoneline off the wall and coil it up next to the BT pole!! Dont want redundant ancient slow copper wires on my house from the incompetent BT, and I dont want to pay them a penny more for them to maintain their useless network!

[#2]

Hi samskellern,
As you know our broadband relies on the BT network. BT, as you may know are involved in the 4G LTE broadband trial in Cornwall, but for news on other broadband initiatives a quick google brings up a few news items.
Jojo

[#3]

As stated, the government shifted from a "universal obligation" of 2Mbps, to aiming at superfast broadband as widespread as possible. In doing this, they effectively shifted the onus on supporting the most rural customers away from single telco companies, such as BT or Virgin, and onto the local authorities.
That means the best place to find out what is going on is your local council. If the parish/town council don't have much going by themselves, then it is the county council. Each council is different, so the amount of public information varies too; try looking at council press releases, or look at some of the broadband websites for their new reports.
The government is putting funding in place via a group called BDUK - which have allocated £3.5M to Leicestershire; the county council have added £4M, and the commercial companies who come in as partners will have to put a matching £7M in too.
The BDUK (+matching funds from councils) are meant to support the "final third" - that part of the country that will not feature in the normal commercial rollout of superfast broadband. As I understand it, the money is meant to take the "superfast" coverage from 67% to 90%, and to get the remainder on something else as fast as possible (at least 2Mbps).
Some links for you to investigate:
- LCC press release
- LCC Broadband page
- News report on the LCC £4M
- Another news report
For anyone else: try Googling "BDUK" plus your county name, or town name.
Right now, a lot of councils are putting out surveys to find what people want - which Leicestershire is about to do too. Information about this will certainly be on the council websites, and almost certainly available in local libraries. I probably don't need to urge people to take part in these surveys, if you're on here.
Is it worth having Plusnet publicise the BDUK initiatives on a county-by-county basis? Or, as part of BT, would that be considered a bad thing to be doing?

[#4]

maaaan i feel sorry for you buddy, seriously, recently i have been giving Plusnet a hard time due to the unstable connection on my 2meg connection!!!!!  My connection is much faster than yours which amazes me , your ONLY the 2nd person ive heard from that has a slower speed than mine, but i dont believe the blame lies solely with Plusnet or other providers, i lay it at  the door of BT and the UK government ,as both seem to be "lagging" when it comes to rolling out Fibre or even upgrading to super fast copper. It makes me laugh when i here that the UK is supposed to be a leading light in technological advances......must be candle light, as countries like Latvia and other emerging nations have much better and faster broadband infrastructure than not-so Great Britain

[#5]

@samskellern: What router do you use?  Some are better than others at getting better speeds for poor lines.