A NOMINEE for best rural broadband in the UK has failed to provide quality service for people… in the same village it operates.

Residents of Rectory Road, Aldham, have raised concerns about the poor quality of their broadband claiming they have regular outages for hours -and even days - on end.

They said County Broadband has failed to address their concerns or give them any reasonable explanation.

However, the firm says recent outages were due to an act of nature and broadband connectivity has since been fully restored.

But frustrated neighbours claim their poor connection is not a one-off incident.

David Collins, 47, of Hoe Farm House, said he has spent nearly eight days in the past two months without WiFi.

He added: “Whilst I’m more than understanding of weather issues and trees coming down on fibre cables it shouldn’t take as long as it has to repair the connection.

“We aren’t given much in the way of explanation either, core network issues being a favourite excuse.”

Many of the residents of Rectory Road are having to work from home due to the pandemic and say they find it hard to complete their day-to-day duties with the lack of reliable service.

Markus Koczian,53, of Hoe Harm Barn, pays £56 for the highest speed fibre internet.

He said: “For everyone operating at home it is important to have a high quality reliable service and that’s what they promised.

“That’s the irony - they can’t provide a decent service to their neighbours.

“We have all complained and we’ve got constant excuses.”

A County Broadband spokesman said the firm understood the frustration the outages have caused and have apologised to customers.

He added: “We provide thousands of homes and businesses across East Anglia with full fibre broadband and the recent network issues affecting some customers in Aldham and Eight Ash Green were quickly resolved and all services have been restored.

“We would like to apologise to our customers and thank them for their patience whilst our engineers carried out urgent repair work.

“A fallen tree damaged cables on August 7. This was fully repaired by midday by August 9. Planned engineering work was carried out and completed by August 13.”

“We proactively kept our customers updated during both incidents.

“We know any loss of our Hyperfast broadband is frustrating and we will continue to put measures in place to prevent future network issues.”