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**A village without phones**

The UK is not a big country, and it certainly is not a poor country. So you probably think communications are very good and everybody can use the internet and mobile phones. But this is not true. In some remote parts of the country, communications are very bad.

Staylittle is a village in the centre of Wales. In 1965, a journalist wrote about the village in a newspaper. He said, ‘it is miles from anywhere.’ That was a long time ago, but communications in the village have not changed very much. You cannot use a mobile phone in Staylittle because there is no signal. There are also problems with the telephone lines. When the villagers make phone calls, they often hear other people’s conversations at the same time!

The people who live there are tired of these problems. ‘You need good telephone lines these days,’ said one woman. ‘Last month I tried to buy something online. That was because I couldn’t give them a phone number.’ Other people have stopped using their phones completely. They’ve started writing letters to friends and relatives instead, just like in the past.

The British government is spending money to improve internet connections in remote parts of the country. For this reason, most of the people in Staylittle hope that communications will get better soon. A few days ago, there was a bad storm in the area. Because of this, most of the telephone lines to Staylittle have stopped working completely. Now the village has only one telephone, in the post office.

A few houses in the village have internet access. However, it isn’t a good idea to use email in an emergency: “Imagine trying to send an email to the fire station and hope that they read it. You need to communicate quickly!”