News - Ofcom says broadband speeds falling short

[HEXUS]

The issue of 'up to' claims is exposed as a new report finds average speeds significantly slower.

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[nightkhaos]

No sherlock. It takes a study for Ofcom to work this out?

*sigh* Does no one understand the fundimental underpinings of how DSL works, and why you will never get the ideal, or advertised speed, ever?

Cable is the only method where you can actually get the advertised speeds, but that has it's own problems, in that it doesn't handle multiple connections well, so it requires more management traffic. Hence 10Mbps Cable is equivelent to about 8Mbps (actual) DSL, and that assumes good upload, which Virgin does not provide.

[Andeh13]

How many studies are they going to do!? This is common knowledge now and yet nothing gets done about it? Ofcom seem utterly utterly toothless in this matter.


(Well said, nightkhaos)

[Steve]

Works for me. Interestingly, I am a lot better off than I was on Virgin 20Mbps, yet they have apparently fared the best.

[nightkhaos]

Works for me. Interestingly, I am a lot better off than I was on Virgin 20Mbps, yet they have apparently fared the best.

Yes, so it seems. I was refering to 10Mbps plan where you barely get 500Kbps upload and under (normal conditions) you will often only get 900KB/s download.

And what do you mean works for you? You're on a 24Mbps plan!

On and are you planning to upgrade your "My System" to say Be*/O2?

[Lee H]

How much money are OFCOM wasting by releasing these studies over and over again?

Talk about something we knew when 2 Mb was the fastest and people complained about slow speeds then.

Now we have suppliers able to provide upto 20 Mb and the same conditions on the phone lines apply. If your line length is too long, or you've got a signal to noise ratio that affects the quality of the broadband then basically it's tough as all BT need to do is provide a line capable of voice communcations and also a speed of broadband which makes even a 56k modem look like a good alternative.

What we need to rectify this is more local exchanges rather than having 1 big exchange covering a wide area. Also, BT need to sort their wiring out. It's not uncommon to hear of people being less than 1 Km from the exchange, yet have a line length greater than this due to some crazy assed "crazy pathing" style wiring up and down the street.

[dangel]

I remember my first big speed upgrade - a 9600 baud modem - wow it felt fast


I have to say though - Britain is a bit behind on things to say the least. We ought to of had 24mpbs everywhere years ago and getting beyond that looks nigh impossible for most of the population (assuming you can even get a mere 2mbps in some areas now..).

[nightkhaos]

I remember my first big speed upgrade - a 9600 baud modem - wow it felt fast

Compared to what? 300 baud? And was this one bit per baud or better?

[[GSV]Myocardial]

How many studies are they going to do!? This is common knowledge now and yet nothing gets done about it? Ofcom seem utterly utterly toothless in this matter.


(Well said, nightkhaos)

Well they are toothless because our Government don't want to allow BT to recoup their expenditure on massively upgrading the network so we have decent speeds. The 21CN upgrades to exchanges will hopefully improve the performance but why would a commercial company put it's money on the line to upgrade copper wires when it is fulfilling it's legal obligation at the moment and struggling with huge deficits in it's pension provisions that is sucking up free cash.

It's great that Virgin can deliver on what it advertises, but if your only cherry picking the easiest to install areas and most demand then your going to be able to provide the speed, although from all the moaning people do about their faster products it never seems like they are that perfect when they push the envelope for their marketing hype.

And all this talk of line length even though your x km from the exchange, well if we built all our houses on the boring grid pattern that the states does then it might work but with the strange expansion that most British villages and towns take, I can imagine it being a nightmare trying to re-run cabling and blooming costly.

[nightkhaos]

And all this talk of line length even though your x km from the exchange, well if we built all our houses on the boring grid pattern that the states does then it might work but with the strange expansion that most British villages and towns take, I can imagine it being a nightmare trying to re-run cabling and blooming costly.

The states can only afford to do that because they have lots of flat or flatable land where they can build, and even then it's only on new housing estates. Grid patterns are the most efficent and do exsist in places where land permits, but often it doesn't.

And he wasn't refering to the strange road networks that we are faced with, he was talking about lines actually physically DOUBLING back along the road. This happens in areas where phone lines were roled out early and have yet to be replaced, because it was cheaper the engineers just to attach to the end of the line, and not all houses would get a phone.

[[GSV]Myocardial]

The states can only afford to do that because they have lots of flat or flatable land where they can build, and even then it's only on new housing estates. Grid patterns are the most efficent and do exsist in places where land permits, but often it doesn't.

And he wasn't refering to the strange road networks that we are faced with, he was talking about lines actually physically DOUBLING back along the road. This happens in areas where phone lines were roled out early and have yet to be replaced, because it was cheaper the engineers just to attach to the end of the line, and not all houses would get a phone.

I understood what he was refering to

if I follow my line back to the exchange (Have to trek across a couple of fields owned by the local estate) it takes a bit of a weird root, goes around a couple of protected trees and up and back down a street that it doesn't really need too, but the cost of running a new wire the couple of miles just for five houses, instead of joining on to the end is probably quite significant over the whole network.

[oolon]

Well here is my virgin 20 Mps! I live in north london so the server isn't exactly far away.



I would change ISP but I would have to get a phone line installed and I want to buy a new house anyway so really can't be bothered going through the hassle unless they really annoy me. Next house I think i will get a BT line and ADSL.

[joel_spencer]

It's just a case of reactivating BT if you want ADSL oolon, but Telewest pissed me off as they left the phone service running in a flat that had been sold then refused to just transfer it to my name which was in their interest. So by the time I'd waited for them to turn it off I was disinclined to use them.
O2 and Be unlimited are basically the same, I went o2 as they give you a discount if you have a phone with them, and so far apart from one wobbly weekend it's been great. Router isn't bad but I stuck with my netgear dg834 (think that's the model number)
Nice to see Tiscali way down the list, utter toss - had my mum on a package that doesn't exist and limited her to 1mbps when every other package had up to 8. Also shaft you with slow traffic if you so much as look at a download. But you know parents they can't be bothered with the hassle of switching. I set her up on wireless so at least I can surf when I'm home.

[oolon]

The thing that made me suspicious of Tiscali is when they started up they seemed to have a kind of pyramid selling scheme where you had to pay to sell broadband and you could make more money by making more agents. My house does not have a BT phone in it... or rather the box is gone and the wires are cut back so it would need a new from the pole. Its annoys me... cable should be so much better than dish and phone line, in capacity and interactivity, but virgin stuff it up. Been a cable user for 16 years Leicester Cable, Diamond cable, Cable and wireless, Cable London, Telewest, Virgin.

[bhogey]

Ofcom come out under their stone now and again, just to show people that their still there and as hapless as ever, they won't do anything to resolve things as long as the money keeps circulating the whole systems broken but no ones willing to fix it. Bungs ahoy.

[TooNice]

TBH, 2MBit download is not the end of the world. Sure, faster is always better, but it's higher upload speed that I'd like.