Does living in a rural region mean slow broadband?

If you’re reading this in an urban metropolis, you might assume that people living in the countryside experience far less dynamic internet connections as a matter of routine.

It’s certainly true that counties like the Scottish Highlands, Cornwall and Gwynedd feature some of the most isolated properties on the British mainland.

Extending full fibre broadband to every bothy and croft is proving extremely expensive, as the Scottish Government’s floundering R100 scheme illustrates.

Nonetheless, a slower pace of life isn’t necessarily synonymous with slow broadband.

In fact, some of Britain’s most sparsely populated regions enjoy impressively rapid broadband…

Northern delights

Honourably excepting the charming border city of Carlisle, Cumbria is a rural region with a few sizeable towns along its coastline – and bucolic villages everywhere else.

It’s certainly not a county where you might expect 99 per cent of homes will have gigabit broadband access by the end of next year.

Yet that’s the claim Cumberland Council made a couple of months ago, in response to over £400 million of broadband deployment schemes being rolled out across the region.

Work has been picking up pace since 2022 thanks to a combination of Project Gigabit rollouts, investment by local full fibre altnets like Grain and ongoing investment from Openreach.

The challenges of reaching the final one per cent of properties endure, having taxed ISPs and infrastructure providers throughout the UK for many years.

Even so, there is surprisingly little correlation between coastal or rural communities.

Head north out of the Argyll village of Lochgilphead, in a region where Gaelic road signs come before their English counterparts, and the single-track B841 arrives at a fork in the road.

To the left is a lane with a handful of properties along it. To the right is the compact harbour of Crinan. And beside you is a part-fibre broadband exchange.

Local residents can sign up to unlimited fibre broadband at speeds which are more than sufficient for streaming/gaming/surfing on multiple devices at once.

For many years, the Crinan exchange was achieving line speeds several times faster than those available to residents in modern suburbs of Scotland’s largest town, East Kilbride.

We find other examples of this phenomenon occurring today.

Some Isle of Wight residents enjoy 900Mbps fibre connections at their homes, while certain streets in east London struggle to get download speeds in excess of 5Mbps.

The East Riding of Yorkshire has had 100 per cent full fibre coverage for years, whereas a housing estate in Antrim is still crawling along with slow download speeds of just 2.28Mbps.

How can I investigate slow broadband issues?

Whether you’re planning a short break, looking to move house or hoping to invest in a buy-to-let property, it’s easy to establish broadband speeds in any location.

Our postcode checker on the BroadbandDeals.co.uk website instantly calculates the maximum line speed likely to be available through the nearest exchange.

Immediately below will be a list of ISPs whose services can be acquired in that location, with inaccessible ones greyed out.

As we recently explained, even holiday homes need a decent broadband connection nowadays, so available line speeds should always be a consideration.

If you’re unsure about your own property’s speeds, run a broadband speed check and compare the results against our guide to what line speeds actually mean.