Broadband letter sent to Digital Champion

Dear Martha Lane Fox

Re: Broadband speeds

We are writing to you in your role as the UK's Digital Champion.

The village of Audlem in south Cheshire, the national winner of Defra's Village of the year for its community spirit, has a very active website, Audlem Online – www.audlem.org – which is read by around 700 people a day (21,000 a month). Our population is under 2,000 although the website does cover three outlying villages and rural areas.

We have had many reports of a deteriorating broadband service in recent months. As you know, most ISPs offer a speed of between 2 and 8mbps. Many people report speeds way below those promised, and paid for, sometimes lower than 0.1mbps.

As a result, Audlem Online set up a broadband speed testing service asking readers to check speeds on different days and times. The results are concerning with the 540 tests in the survey over a period of just over three weeks showing a very poor average speed of 2.361mbps which had fallen to 2.137 by the end of the test period. Indeed speeds were deteriorating throughout the period of the survey.

While we cannot state categorically that these speeds are absolutely accurate – they measured the speed of the connection to the Audlem Online server based at Keele University – tests at the same time using other speed testing websites did produce similar results.

Audlem Online has over one hundred local businesses in its Organisations section, many of which need a better and more reliable broadband speed than achieved at present. Rural areas are even more dependent than urban areas on the internet and we would like to see effective action by BT and the ISPs to improve our service, or at least to tackle the recent deterioration. Equally we need the new superfast broadband service as soon as it becomes available.

We would very much like you to add your weight to our arguments and trust the attached summary will be of interest and will allow you to take this forward. If you need more details, we can supply this although we would want to ensure the confidentiality of the details of those participating in the survey.

Audlem village has embraced the internet in a progressive way with local campaigning, community activity, the promotion of a wide range of events featured every day on the website. The website was recently voted the best in Cheshire and has been featured in TV programmes such as the One Show and has attracted full-page coverage in national newspapers such as the Independent – although we cannot claim to have matched your interesting double-page spread last month in that very newspaper!