Rural election issues: Broadband

In the run up to the General Election Farmers Weekly looks at five issues on minds of rural voters. Here Cheshire dairy farmer Christine Conder discusses broadband.

Christine Conder
Dairy farmer and contractor
Cheshire

“It is going to be hard to vote in this election having seen the fiasco that was the Digital Economy Act going through parliament earlier this month.

It was trying to protect the music industry from illegal downloads, but politicians didn’t listen to experts for advice so a badly flawed law got through.

In our area many farmers come down to the village and use our wi-fi connection because they can’t get broadband or mobile at home.

The Act means we won’t be able to provide this free service much longer – if they download a few songs for the Christmas party from our IP address we could be taken to court and fined over file sharing.

The £6-a-year phone levy proposed by the current government to bring high-speed internet to the whole country was a strawman used to keep the media happy and take the heat away from the cover-up of an ageing copper phone network that can never deliver.

Even with the levy the ministers say they can’t see a way of connecting the last 10% to super-fast broadband, which basically means farmers. The way to move forward is for government to allow private investment.”