A PETITION has been launched to provide faster internet access for Haydon Wick after it was claimed the area was ignored due to an administrative error.

An oversight by internet providers left Haydon Wick without the option of faster, fibre-optic broadband, and the numbers of people trying to connect to the exchange have slowed speeds down to a crawl.

Colin Polonowski, 37, of Haydon Wick, launched the petition to bring the error to the attention of BT and has set up a blog to provide information around the subject.

He said the problem arose when a new exchange for parts of Haydon Wick was set up, but many residents were not transferred.

“When the North Swindon housing developments were first built, the initial residents were connected to the Blunsdon exchange,” he said. “This was massively over subscribed and there were long waiting lists to even get a phone line up until the Haydon Wick exchange became available.

“Anyone in Taw Hill through to at least Redhouse and maybe Ash Brake were then migrated over to the new exchange, but their original records still listed them against Blunsdon. The result was that the Blunsdon exchange is reported internally as having a huge number of subscribers whereas in contrast, Haydon Wick is under reported.

“As a result, BT Openreach use these stats to determine the number of people on each exchange and therefore which exchanges are priorities for fibre-based internet.

“Despite the massive numbers of people in North Swindon, no one on the Haydon Wick exchange has access to faster than ADSL internet speeds and it’s now so heavily populated that those who do get broadband are getting slow connections thanks to a high contention ratio.”

BT said it was unable to comment on the individual exchanges. A spokesman for BT said: “Haydon Wick is not currently part of BT’s commercial roll out of fibre-optic broadband.

“Haydon Wick is part of the Swindon Council area, and so is not part of the Wiltshire and South Gloucestershire fibre broadband project.”

David Renard, the leader of Swindon Council, who also represents Haydon Wick, has been working with BT to extend coverage of fibre broadband in the town.

After meetings with the company, he said progress is being made towards a general roll out.

“We might be able to attract funding from part of the Government’s projects,” he said. “We are going to provide a more detailed summary of the areas which are in need of coverage.”

The petition can be found at www.change.org.