The UK is currently building out it's broadband network to provide 2MBps [0] to everyone by next year, and "Superfast" broadband to most people with the next couple of years. There is a local bidding process for who the funding goes to, but in most cases it is BT meaning people will get up to 24Mbps. There is a bit of controversy though as local initiatives like this are being shunned in favour of BT due to red tape [1].
I wonder whether it would be better to instead invest in 4G services in rural areas. Here I can't even get 2G (yeah this place is a bit remote), but most rural areas have that or 3G in the UK.
I feel that achieving the 2MBps by next year will be very unlikely.
I live in a very rural area and over the past 3-4 years our internet has gone from poor (0.5MBps) to nothing. We were told by an engineer that the wire is so badly damaged that there is nothing that he could do and the majority of the wire from the exchange from our house to the exchange would have to be replaced. Its so bad landline calls are no inaudible due to the amount of noise coming down the line.
What did BT have to say about this? Absolutely nothing, there is a flag on our account letting the call centers know that there is nothing they can do for us. They just keep telling us to move ISPs. But everything goes down the BT line anyway so thats just moving the problem elsewhere.
(Its quite sad that I can remember the sequence of numbers to press when ringing up to get through to the tech support and then the script they used to ask when tried to resolve our issues.)
There are about 5 other houses with us, then about 4 miles before the next town, and then the exchange. In total we are about 5-7 miles from the exchange (which is fibre ready).
The problem for us now is that everyone just expects broadband of some form or another, its like a utility. Nobody wants to buy a house with no water, or electric and now people don't want to buy a house without broadband. So we've got to the point where we are trying to move house to get access to the internet but cannot sell our current house to get the funds to move.
EDIT: Also just like to add that I've looked into 4G and due to the landscape, it wasn't an option :(
I wonder whether it would be better to instead invest in 4G services in rural areas. Here I can't even get 2G (yeah this place is a bit remote), but most rural areas have that or 3G in the UK.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/broadband-delivery-uk
[1] http://northdorsetbroadband.co.uk/