So much for “Digital Britain” and advertised speeds of “up to 20Mb”.

I live in London, so not exactly rural or out of the way, and my telephone line is a BT line. BT suggest – via their website – that I can get up to 2Mb download speeds but nothing greater than that. And of course the actual truth, as confirmed to me today by my present broadband providers, O2, is that:

“We’ve estimated that your maximum download speed is 0.5 meg. This is based on information BT gave us about your BT line. The reason why you can’t get better speed is because of the distance between your home and your local exchange which is about 5930 meters.

So, there’s nothing that we can do in this instance. At the best you can realistically hope for speed up to 1Mb download speed. Therefore, we’re unable to provide you with better speed.”

Great, eh?