Beware of what you wish for. How often have we ignored that warning? Well, it certainly struck home with a vengeance at Wood Farm in recent weeks.

Like many people who live in rural areas, our broadband service has been somewhat sketchy. Wood Farm is the last place on the line to be served by the broadband box which sits at the far end of our village, and for years, sending emails has been a game of chance.

If the system didn’t crash completely, then there was often not quite enough strength left to send an attachment as well as an email. According to BT, the furthest distance from the box that they would guarantee to provide a service is 0.6 of a kilometre, and we are exactly 0.59!

So, over the years, life has been full of frustrations, and the only time that we could really guarantee a reasonable service was at about 3am! 

Imagine our excitement then when, last summer, Rob found a man from Openreach scrabbling around in the grass verge opposite our farm entrance, apparently searching for our existing broadband cable.

Fibre broadband was finally on the way. In October, the magic day arrived, and the cabling was pulled through the existing ducts, pushed through a hole in our house wall, and into a cupboard in the utility room. And there it stopped.

A letter from Openreach followed, seeking permission to pull a cable through our fields and into the house, claiming that a junction box needed to be built halfway, as it was too far to install the cable in one length.

We explained that the cable had already been installed in one length, but this was ignored. 

Numerous angry phone calls and emails later, our fibre broadband was finally fully connected, and our upload speed went from half a megabit to nearly 29. However, excitement at the novelty of being able to send rapid emails quickly evaporated when we tried to use the new, digital phones. Instead of email connections failing, we now have phones dropping out – constantly!