Sorry, long rant ahead...
We're relocating to be closer to family because DH can now work from home 100% and are looking to live in a semi-rural location in the South of Scotland. It is a reasonably built up area, so we are not talking about being in the wilds by any means. We think we have found a house that we like and did a postcode check on the BT website and it said that broadband between the speeds 1MB min and 2.5 MB max were possible.
I phoned BT today to try to understand a better estimate of the speed, to be told it was between 0.516 and 2MB, that is considerably lower than their web estimate. DH could have managed with 1MB according to his employer?s home working policy.
I explained the situation regarding the need to know what speed was available before making a binding offer on the house to be told that there is nothing that they can do to confirm these. I said I would be happy to pay the cost of having an engineer go out to the house (as long as the vendor was willing). They said no, the only thing they could do was take an order and process it. The attitude seemed to be that you get what you get in terms of speed and there was nothing else they can do.
Is this really reasonable? I mean, if you walked into a supermarket and asked for apples and were given toilet clean instead, the shop would be consider unreasonable, no? At least that?s the way I see it.
Now, I understand that broadband is a shared service, and the speed is dependent on how many people are online, etc. But there surely must be some way to at least get a best guess on what speed we could get, or a minimum speed? Being able to live away from our current area completely depends on DH being able to use local broadband to work from home, but how can we know what is available if all that BT can do is sort of shrug down the phone and tell us we have to book the service?
I'm so bewildered by this that I can't see a way to know which house we could buy in these circumstances. Who in there right mind would be willing to risk the cost of a house and moving expenses in the hopes that you might luck out and buy one that has sufficient service available. It's crazy! Or is the only other alternative to buy in the middle of a city, with a telephone exchange over the garden fence? Has anyone else faced this and won? Any words of wisdom would be gratefully received.