Residents of Llandewi Rhydderch who were left without telephone and broadband connections for nine days are determined to pursue the issue of existing and future telecom services in rural areas with the powers-that-be.

Mr Bruce Hayward-Blake, a retired senior civil servant, argues that the service to rural areas in Monmouthshire is far inferior to that in the world's developing countries where, ironically, the call centres dealing with our IT problems are located.

He says his main concern is that BT has been allowed a monopoly of the network business.

"In the US the piggy-backing of services isn't allowed," he said.

"As it is BT has no priority for the needs of rural villages. When they put in new phone lines here four or five years ago I asked why they were using copper not fibre optic and they said it was because it was cheaper.

"The fact is there's little if any chance of them investing in ultra-fast internet to rural areas like this - yet there are plenty of people here who really need it.

"People are trying to run all sorts of businesses from home nowadays. Farmers need their email to send information to the Government, people on benefits need internet access, old people need to keep in touch with the outside world.

"When there's so much emphasis on doing business via the internet everything is affected.

"At the latest check my broadband speed was .75mb per second. It's absolutely ridiculous when people in paddy fields in South East Asia are getting 40mb!

"It's a nationwide utility resource which should be available to everyone."

He added, "When you lose your connection BT seems to think that, because everyone has a mobile phone, being without a landline or email isn't that big a deal.

"They don't seem to realise that a lot of mobile phones, depending on the service provider you have, are as good as useless in the country. I have to hold mine so far outside the kitchen window to get a signal that I can't get near enough to the mouthpiece to speak into it!

"When the connection went down the other day I drove several miles to get a decent mobile signal to report the fault. It's not exactly ideal if BT puts you on callback when you're sitting in your vehicle in the middle of the countryside on a wet winter evening!"

Like several of his neighbours, Mr Hayward-Blake made regular visits to an internet cafe in Abergavenny.

"It might have helped if BT had kept us informed of what they were doing - at least that would have made us feel more valuable as customers," he said. "I know the BT Openreach engineers got an earful from several residents when they finally appeared and I plan to find the name and address of the chairman of BT and bombard him with complaints!"

Another resident Len Dando, who runs a civil engineering company, has already written an open letter to the BT chairman via Monmouth MP David Davies.

He describes BT's response to the recent problems as 'diabolical', pointing out that while it took nine days to restore phones and broadband to the village, it took the engineers less than two days to do the necessary repair.

In all this time the only contact available to customers was with overseas call centres.

"Although I left my mobile number and our office number in Abergavenny we had no response other than when my phone came back on there was six messages from BT - each one saying that the phone would be repaired next day.

"I think this about sums up BT's top directors' attitudes to their customers. They spend £900 million on sport and give us a substandard service."