Sitting at home in Hamstead Marshall, a village alongside the M4 corridor near Newbury, Penny Stokes is wringing her hands in frustration at her horribly slow dial-up internet connection, indignant at being left behind while claims abound that the population of Britain enjoys near-universal access to broadband.

“I run the village website, and uploading pictures to the site is desperately tedious. I’m researching a book on local history, but I have to go to the library rather than use the web,” she said. “We’ve been trying to get broadband for so long, and have been messed about so much by BT, that we have given up hope.”

Politicians, BT and the telecoms regulator, Ofcom, are all patting themselves on the back, declaring Britain the most broadband-enabled country in the G8 group of leading industrial nations, while campaigners and internet service providers (ISPs) insist that Britain stands only on the first rung of a long ladder.

Whole swathes of the country languish in broadband “not spots”, losers in a postcode lottery that means they are unable to enjoy the benefits of the fast, always- on connections that are vital to small businesses, home workers and the 21st- century knowledge economy.

BT, which effectively owns the infrastructure for supplying broadband over phone lines (substantially by ADSL), claims to have fulfilled its promise to deliver broadband access to 99.6% of British phone lines — residential and business — leaving only 80,000 non- enabled. Yet ISPs have said they “seriously doubt” this claim, calling it “patently untrue” and “just silly”, although most are too reliant on BT to go on the record.

Bulldog, an ISP that has invested heavily in broadband, would not comment even privately. It needs access to BT’s exchanges in order to install the equipment through which to offer its own services, a process called local-loop unbundling (LLU), which is the key to competition, releasing ISPs from having to piggyback on BT wholesale services.

Broadband “access” is inherently tricky to define, being susceptible to many physical factors, such as the efficiency of ageing copper phone wires. Even an agreed base rate for broadband is fudged — Ofcom says 128kbps, BT 256kbps and most other players 512kbps. Some experts believe that as many as one in 20 (or close to a million) homes lacks a sufficiently fast connection to download music, watch web-based video or share photos, but BT declines to make public the raw data supporting its assertion that almost everyone has “access”.

“Some companies are guilty of pretending that it’s ubiquitous, but clearly it’s not,” said David Williams, head of Avanti Screenmedia, which provides satellite broadband to areas with neither ADSL nor cable. “In the reasonably urban West Midlands alone, there are 17 communities we know of without access, and in the UK, it could be 5% or 10% that can’t receive a viable service. Certainly, it’s a market big enough to make our satellite- broadband business worthwhile.”

Hamstead Marshall is hardly a tech- nology backwater, lying just outside Newbury, the home of Vodafone UK, but even BT last week conceded it was among the forgotten few. The village’s phone lines connect to three exchanges, all of which are ADSL-enabled, but homes are clustered in the middle of this triangle, and broadband signals degrade over distance, so they run out of puff before reaching the village.

Tim Johnson, chief executive of the broadband research specialist Point Topic, said: “The standard range for 512kbps is 3.2 miles, and 9% of the population has line lengths longer than this.” BT said that it tries to provide the best service it can to all homes, and that prescribed standards can be beaten, but clearly there are technical restraints.

“The houses with broadband connections here are on the outskirts, closest to the Kintbury, Newbury and Highclere exchanges,” Stokes said. “I find it really hard to believe that, just outside ‘Vodaville’, I am an unlucky blip in the statistics. About 70 homes and businesses, including the Elm Farm Research Centre, are all in the same boat.”

Determining the precise patterns of availability is essential if the gaps are to be filled with broadband alternatives to the BT and cable networks. “The problem is far bigger than we imagined, or the authorities are admitting,” said Lindsey Annison of the Access to Broadband Campaign (ABC). “If we don’t know where the ‘not spots’ are, we can’t go to RDAs (regional development agencies) and seek funding, because they need to know how many small wireless networks might be needed.”

Community Broadband Networks and the ABC have set up a web survey, inviting anyone without broadband access or struggling with a slow connection to sign on at www.notspot.info. Results are expected in late March, but BT said that it doesn’t expect any shocks, and that the few deprived people create a disproportionate level of noise.

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming