Finding a faster connection

I live in the countryside outside Preston Lancashire. My BT broadband yields me 0.5 Mbps down and 0.2 Mbps up. I want to find a faster connection, say 10 times faster, in the centre of Preston using a notebook and either WiFi or a dongle. I don't really know how to go about this. Does any one have any detailed knowledge ? Or, if you were in my position, what would you do ?

What?

Where do you need the connection? You've said to places, Preston and somewhere rural!

For starters, post the full statistics reported by your router, .5 and .2, could it be you are on a fixed half meg connection ?

We are 6 km from the exchange and the BT guys told me that this was the best I'd get for a while.

For most of my purposes, the connection is perfectly OK. However, I am now expecting to have to start handling some bigger files. So I thought what I'd do is to buy a net book, go into Preston centre where, somewhere, there must be a faster connection that I can hire time on. Then I would transfer all these bigger files using the faster connection. Then go home.

There simply has to be an optical fibre coming into Preston and there simply has to be some way for a paying customer to get access to something faster than my country wire.

I don't know where to look, or who to ask.

Could you look at the reply I sent to zarjaz, please ? This ought to make it clearer.

There will be plenty of WiFi hotspots and speeds will vary from what you are getting up to 30 Mbps or even more but availability of higher data rates will depend on how many other users.

What about an Internet cafe? They may be willing to come to an arrangement with you and hopefully they may have a 30+ Mbps connection.

WIFI hotspots ,cyber cafe's ,bt wifi hotspots or you could always drive around seeking a healthy un secure wireless network and just piggy back off that,although a bit on the unreliable side,lol
Do you not have a freind or relative that has a faster broadband connection that you could use?

your best bet would be a starbucks,
or alternatively try one of these
http://www.yell.com/s/internet+cafes-preston-lancash...

Still need statistics from your router to know if you are getting the fastest that you could be getting.

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php

You might find that three mobile broadband can provide a much better download and upload speed than a 6km BT line can.

3G is highly variable. That said we use it here at home where it delivers about 2 to 3 meg down versus half that with ADSL so we've used it for years. That's with Three. I recently tried a T-Mobile dongle here which achieved 1meg down and seems to hit 3meg upstream regularly.

If I go into town and use my mobile, it will be like lighning, slow or completely unusable regardless of the signal strength, suspect it's just contention. Which is probably why it works well as a home broadband connection in a lightly populated area and is hit and miss in town.

It will even depend precisely where in town, e.g. I wouldn't expect much speed outside a cafe opposite a train station at 09:00 or 17:30.

It may suffice, it may not - however have you actually tried one at home? As you may well find you don't need either the landline or the trips into town then.