TENANTS at a business park threatened to “revolt” in protest at slow broadband speeds.

Owners of firms at Lower Farm Barns in Bucknell, near Bicester, said they were not prepared to wait until 2015 for BT to upgrade the service and were looking to move elsewhere until landlord Richard Carlton stepped in.

Mr Carlton has now bypassed BT and joined forces with tenants to invest £19,000 in a new, upgraded broadband system in a bid to keep his tenants happy.

He said: “All of my tenants rely on the Internet and their businesses were suffering due to slow broadband speeds.

“I was faced with a tenants’ revolt and either had to look at ways for improving the broadband service or risk losing them.”

Paul Wilson, IT manager of tenant firm Red Engineering Design (RED), which designs the infrastructure of buildings across the world, said: “We have to push a lot of architectural content around the world and we were getting to crisis point. We were looking at moving although we were not keen on it as it is very difficult to find suitable business premises in Oxfordshire.”

Mr Wilson said that if RED had been forced to invest in its own dedicated broadband system it would have cost £500 a month instead of the £280 it is paying to share the network with other tenants on the business park.

In August, Oxfordshire County Council chose BT as its commercial partner to deliver a £25m boost to the county’s broadband service.

The scheme will aim to have a minimum speed of 24 megabits per second (Mbps) available to 90 per cent of businesses and homes in Oxfordshire by the end of 2015.

After consulting Kidlington agents VSL, Mr Carlton had a new service from Milton Keynes-based telecommunications business Managed247, to provide Lower Farm Barns tenants with Internet speeds of between 10mb and 100mb.