Is The New Stonehenge Visitor's Centre Causing Another Sort of Jam?

The location of the new Stonehenge Visitor's Centre and the premature and regrettable closure of the A344 have had demonstrable negative impacts on traffic flow on the A303 and in the surrounding villages.  That's the reason for the very existence of this blog and the Stonehenge Traffic Action Group campaign to dual the A303 along its entire length as a local, national and European priority.

It's very tempting to blame English Heritage for many of the local issues that crop up in relation to the Stonehenge World Heritage Site - and indeed, over the years, English Heritage's actions and manner of dealing with local communities haven't exactly enamoured them to local folks.  Take a look through the public records of past inquiries and planning issues if you want to get a feel for how they have behaved in the past.  That said, at least the local management now appears to want to work with local communities in a way that hasn't been apparent in the past - so progress does seem to be being made.

Some folks would like to blame English Heritage for all our local woes: be it curdled milk, crying children, the weather, sour beer, etc, etc.  Now, even I, jaundiced as I am, wouldn't go quite that far.  But odd things have been happening hereabouts since the start of the year and I do wonder, if English Heritage and the new Visitor's Centre might, very unwittingly, be at the root of it.

Many of the local villages - Winterbourne Stoke, Tilshead, Orcheston and Shrewton itself are served by the Shrewton telephone exchange.  We have old, decrepit and failing aluminium telephone lines that make use of the internet for more than basic functions, very difficult. During the last few months and in the last few weeks particularly, broadband speeds have been dropping massively during working hours and then rising again in the evenings and staying that way until early morning.  Odd, as that means when most villagers are using the internet, the speeds are fastest - almost the opposite of what you might expect to happen.

It raises the question of what might be gobbling up all the network bandwidth during the working day.  The only major change over the last year that has happened over the last year has been the opening of the Stonehenge Visitors Centre.  We wonder if in the new location it is connected to the Shrewton telephone exchange, rather than the bigger exchange in Amesbury - where it might have been connected to in its former location on the A344.  Could this really be the cause of another form of jam in the local infrastructure.  We'll be asking BT to take a look.

UPDATE:  Typically, since this post was published, the problem seems to have become a 24 hour affair.  Ping times can vary from 33ms to 880ms over a matter of seconds.  We've also lost broadband completely, but not the connection to the exchange, several times.