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Guy Glitchy: Villagers torch Openreach effigy

Huh! More like 'won't reach'

Bonfire night has come a long way since Guy Fawkes' failed attempt to blow up the House of Lords on 5 November 1605. Now, we prefer to burn more modern day villains. Such as Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump and, er, Openreach.

The good people of Templeton, Devon, in England, erected the van in protest over slow broadband speeds.

Templeton Bonfire Night has a theme each year and this year they decided to choose BT. The two-dimensional structure was emblazoned with the word "open" crossed out on the side of the van to be replaced with: "Won'treach".

According to Devon Live, the area has had problems with broadband due to its rural location.

Resident Adam Short told Devon Live the majority of households in the village that still use BT/Openreach in general receive less than 1Mbps download speeds.

“Upload speeds are almost zero! There really are very few places in our village where a 2G phone signal can be reliably found, let alone 4G.

“I am a Network Architect by trade, and attempting to run my business from home, like many others here. My technical background has allowed me some degree of success, but it’s certainly not been straightforward to achieve, nor is it 100 per cent reliable.”

However, the effort was arguably not the most inventive effigy. The folk of Market Harborough reportedly burnt an effigy of "That London".

A spokesman from BT told Devon Live: "Templeton is an extremely rural community which makes rolling out fibre broadband much more challenging.

"Templeton was not included in Openreach's commercial roll-out of fibre broadband or the first phase of the Connecting Devon and Somerset partnership but we're working hard to find alternative ways of bringing faster broadband to residents.

"A number of residents in Templeton have signed up to Openreach's Community Fibre Partnership (CFP) programme and engineers have already completed initial surveys of the area to see if we can build faster broadband to the village.

"We are also looking at a mobile broadband solution with EE and local partners, which could see local people able to access much faster broadband speeds in their home using 4G technology." ®

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