BROADBAND users on Skye might be back online soon after telecomms giant BT said bad weather has hampered engineers’ efforts to restore service to parts of the island.

Furious islanders, many of whom use the internet for business, have been complaining since before Christmas about an “impossibly downgraded” service, with typical speeds of 0.07 Mbps for downloads.

However, a BT spokesman said in a statement last night that riggers had fixed an intermittent fault at the Scoval radio station serving the Dunvegan area on Hogmanay.

He said: “This was a very complicated fault to diagnose and poor weather conditions exacerbated the time taken to repair it. The fault was caused by small levels of rainwater entering the building where the cables run between the microwave radio dishes located on the mast and the equipment in the building.”

Droplets of water had fallen onto the radio equipment that carried the signal to Dunvegan, causing it to fail. The spokesman added: “This equipment was replaced on a number of occasions before the source of the fault was found. It’s quite warm within the building and the water ingress was very small so it quickly evaporated, hampering our investigations.

“We also replaced all the radio equipment and the cabling at both ends of the link [Dunvegan and Scoval].

“Engineers are now planning to replace equipment at Urray exchange near Muir of Ord, one of the broadband routes between North Skye and Inverness.”

A delighted Valerie Mansley, from Arnisort, one of those who depends on broadband for her work, told The National last night: “We were told that a card has been replaced in the radio station and that appears to have solved the problem.

“I did a speed test earlier and we’re getting a download rate of six Mbps, which is more like it.

“There are some people whose speeds are still slow, but I imagine they’ll pick up as the repair progresses. But the card has been replaced before and didn’t solve the problem, so I think some of us are still not too confident that this will solve the problem.”

More than 900 users had taken to Facebook to complain about broadband speeds and last night a number reported an improvement.

Richard Dorrell, from Roskhill posted: “Ookla and BT Wholesale tests both giving almost identical results – download 3.7, upload 0.36, ping 46. Fastest download speed (by a long way) since 16 December.”

Another user reported: “We’ve got 6.8 download speed here. Amazing... let’s hope it lasts.”

However, Iona Macleod was one of those whose problems remained: “Still dire in Glenhinnisdal (Uig exchange). Ping 1324 ms, download 0.22, upload 0.08. Just about impossible to do anything.”