Surrey’s rural communities deserve better mobile and internet connectivity
Internet outages in a Surrey village have left people “unable to carry out daily tasks” and led to calls for better connectivity in rural parts of the county.
Large parts of Charlwood lost access to broadband services, impacting residents, businesses, and home workers – with the impact amplified by poor 4G and 5G reception.
Feargal Hogan, works from home but had to travel to neighbouring towns to get signal during the outage.
He said: “It’s been pretty poor. We had an outage in Charlwood Monday and Tuesday. It was very difficult to get information about what was going on, and when it would resolve itself.”
Mr Hogan said he used to run both fibre and copper to ensure there was a back up if one went down but the older service has since been shut off, leaving the town at the mercy of its fibre connection.
He said: “It worked well because if the fibre went down the copper worked, and vice verse
“But about a month ago Openreach said they were shutting down the copper service. I was very annoyed and shopped around but couldn’t find anyone to provide it, so had to let the service go.
“A week later the whole village’s fibre goes off and nobody knows why. There is no 5G coverage in Charlwood and the 4g is rubbish.
“When we were trying to call to report a fault we couldn’t get a signal, we were having to drive to Redhill, or Horley.”
The problems have led to the Dorking and Horley MP pushing for the government and companies to improve mobile signal in more rural areas of the constituency.
Openreach was contacted about the situation and said it was aware of an issue that affected some of the homes in the area. They did not provide a more detailed explanation.
MP Chris Coghlan said: “Several people in Charlwood came to me after being left without internet all day on Monday and parts of Sunday.
“People were unable to work or carry out everyday tasks, with some complaining that communication about the issue was non-existent from providers.
“The 4G and 5G coverage in this area is also very poor, leaving many stranded with no connection all day.”
An Openreach spokesperson said: “We’re sorry for the disruption caused by a fault on our network in the area.
“Our engineers identified and repaired the fault, and services are now back up and running.”