VILLAGERS in a south Powys community are demanding action from British Telecom over a ‘terrible’ broadband service and an alleged reluctance to sort the problems out.

And now, residents of Llangenny have lodged a petition with the Welsh Government to try and pressurise BT into installing high speed broadband to the village as a matter of urgency.

A spokesman for the villagers, Duncan Forbes said, ‘Never mind high-speed broadband we don’t have a proper low speed broadband signal to this village.

‘We are fed up with the appalling service we are getting. Pretty much every day someone in the village has a problem with their broadband and the BT engineers who come say they are in the village regularly trying to fix faults.

‘Today the engineer in the village told me the connections were old and letting in water. Our broadband signals go as low as 0.01Mb/s at times and it fluctuates wildly during the day.

And each time we call they tell us it will cost £250 if the fault turns out to be in our homes - which it never does. They must be wasting thousands with visits their engineers have made without sorting out the underlying problem.

Many residents in this village are trying to run businesses from home such as the pub, farms, consultancies and it’s very difficult to do so.

Karen and George Heffernan, who run the pub in the village said, ‘We use the internet for all manner of Government related things with the business tax, VAT, employee earnings returns and rural payments Wales communications and so on.

‘Like everyone else in the village we have had no end of problems with BT generally. The phones have been down 7 or 8 times in the past few months and we know for a fact that the damaged cable half way down the road is wrapped in a plastic bag.

Glyn Maddocks who also works from home said, ‘We were recently without any broadband at all for four weeks and had five different engineers calling before they finally found the fault and fixed it. But even with it fixed, the signal is frequently so poor it is impossible to work on line from home.“

The petition will now be considered by the Petitions Committee of the Welsh Assembly.