ANGRY entrepreneurs in Hutton are claiming they have lost more than £100,000 of new business because BT has refused to upgrade their broadband.
Chris Futcher, 60, and Stuart Schwartz, 64, have run Schwartz Printing from Prospect Way, on the Hutton industrial estate, for the past five years with a download speed of 1.6mb per second at best.
The pair claim that, at worst, their internet connection drags along at a snail's pace of 0.55kb per second – the equivalent to dial-up, the predecessor to broadband.
However, their £9 per month contract with BT should deliver them a 20mb per second download rate and, according to Mr Futcher, their customers, which include West End theatres, are getting sick of waiting to receive files.
He claims that in the past year he began to realise that customers where refusing to work with him because people have become accustomed to speedier internet use.
"We've lost work because customers in London are reluctant to give us work because it takes so long to download a file," he said.
"We have spoken to BT on so many occasions it's impossible to say how many. It's just that when we started losing work, that's when we started saying this is not right, it's not fair."
Mr Futcher says that BT has offered to provide a faster service by linking them direct to the exchange in Brentwood, but it will cost £8,000 per year on a five-year contract, which he says they cannot afford and shouldn't have to pay because of their existing deal.
The businessman also insists he has tried to make an arrangement with the telecoms giant, whereby all the firms on the estate pay a sum for the upgrade, but that BT has not responded.
Mr Futcher said: "I have asked them to tell me how much it's going to cost and I will personally go around to the local businesses to see if we can all chip in and pay for it together.
"I think it's disgusting that I should offer to do that and cannot even get a bloomin' cost out of them."
A broadband speed dictates how quickly the internet works on a computer and the reason for the slow service, which is affecting up to 50 businesses on the estate, is because BT has not upgraded the network (Box 69) to fibre optic technology.
Dave Moore, the owner of Mountune, a motorsports business, said: "The actual speed is pretty dire. We've got 16 employees on less than 2mb maximum speed.
"What's crazy is that nearly all of our employees have got faster broadband at home."
A BT spokesman said: "We have carried out extensive surveys with regards to the cabinet that serves the industrial estate, and it is not commercially viable to us to deploy alone.
"We have been in discussions with representatives at the site and are investigating whether the cabinet can be funded by estate residents."
