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Many Brits are missing out on the speedy benefits of broadband packages they are sold, warns Ofcom.
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Read more.Quote:
Many Brits are missing out on the speedy benefits of broadband packages they are sold, warns Ofcom.
The irony being that it's taken them over 3 years to discover what everyone already knows!
Ofcom and the ASA have been complicit in allowing the situation to become so bad in the first place.
Ofcom are simply unfit for purpose.
Agreed, the powers that be have been sitting on their arses allowing it for ages.
I've had 2.5 meg "broadband" which is supposed to be "up to 8 meg" for abour 3 years now.
Like the others above, my view is that OfCom appear to have finally noticed what the rest of us have known, and moaned about, for years.
The way broadband speeds are marketed is, in my view, frankly disgraceful. They may be able to come up with a rationale for why we never hit advertised speeds, but if an estate agent or used car dealer advertised this way, they be severely castigated, if not prosecuted.
The speed claims are nearly always badly misleading, and that's putting it politely.
Having said that, and despite having other issues with their method of operation, I would agree that with OfCom's report in that Virgin/NTL come much closer, in my personal experience, to hitting claimed speeds than ADSL providers do.
The problem with Ofcom is that it's full of people that don't understand what's happening. This has become very clear over the years with their various "reports". The industry is moving too fast for them.
They are toothless and take little action where it should be taken. When they do finally take action, it's for issues that are so old they are hard to change.
Take this for example - nothing more than stating the obvious and what has been known since day one of broadband going live in the UK. And what are they going to do about it....ermm....nothing, actually - they just thought they'd tell us :rolleyes:
When I was asked my current ISP IDNet if they could supply my folks with broadband in the middle of now where in Wales they checked the number and said yes and should be able to get about 2.5Mg for them. Guess what they have a 2.3 average.
Maybe ISP's need to run a sliding cost scale depending on what service they can deliver !
There are too many factors involved for the ISPs to ever be truly in the wrong though. They don't own the lines, OpenReach does. The quality of your house wiring is your problem, not theirs. Does their backhaul have to provide the advertised throughput all the time? To what sites must they guarantee advertised speeds?
If I was an ISP why would I ever advertise anything less than the transmission technology theoretically allows? Neither the ISP nor the customer can know what speed is truly possible until they're hooked up.
In an ideal world we'd have two things:
1. Published, audited statistics from the ISPs on what Internet (not just modem<->DSLAM) speeds their user base are seeing.
2. Only pay for the speed you can achieve.
The problem with 1. is how much would it cost for the ISPs to monitor this and what form should the statistics take (HTTP traffic is sporadic and not usually going to saturate the connection, so how does that tell us what speed they can get?)
The problem with 2. is that it will end up being more expensive for us. Most of us don't like being charged for data transfer after all.
Anyone rember the online Petition about this?
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Unlimited-ADSL/
I signed it a the time, and so did around 9,000 other people. The Prime minister posted a response, (Which is no longer available online) along the lines that the industry was regulating itself, and there was no need to anything. i.e. We don't care if consumers get cheated because no one important enough has complained yet.
Well just to even things out a bit, my dad pays for 4Mb download and 0.25Mb upload, both of which are actually exceeded..
So the network isn't all bad :).
http://www.speedtest.net/result/893546329.pnghttp://www.speedtest.net/result/893547962.pnghttp://www.speedtest.net/result/893549735.png
I even get that speed to another country.. Which probably means I should get my line upgraded to the 8mb package for £5 more.
I' m with Virgin Media. My 20mb package delivers around the 19.5 mark which leaves me very little room to complain.
I hate being with a company that leaves me with so little to whine about in response to a thread. Grrrrrrrr.:rant:
To be honest, there is the arguement that if we paid for the data we used (per MB or GB), then it'd drive the development of faster and faster services so we could consume more data and thus be charged more...
agree that this report is rather late, i'm sure everyone who checks will know whatever is in the report and people who didnt care probably would care still. Bout time broadband companies start to be honest rather than just exploit the "FROM" advertising.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/894256202.png
"up to 24" connection.
wish ofcom would fine BT with there advert of Superfast 24mb broadband you need to be within 200-400m from the extrange with good wiring or be on Brand new wiring that shielded to get it and still be close
if you can only get 4mb getting upto 24mb is not going to make that 4mb go any faster, SKY also need to be fined as well for cold calling at the doors miss selling broadband i know in fact when i am every one can only get 0.5-1.5mb speeds flat out lie that virgin can Only provide 15mb LOL (6MB/s or 50mb really is the reality as i know i have it) and we can give you faster on SKY (LOL no its in-fact 1mb where i am on BT line) for the next 2-5 years as got to wait for BT to do FTTC (like cable do, when that happens that could pose issues for virgin media but thats like 5-8 years away for them thought as its not very fast what BT do)
an simple check on http://www.samknows.com/broadband/broadband_checker shows what you can get (not as accurate once it gets above 14mb as speeds tend to be higher then what it reports, but most of the time its dead one once its below 5mb)
Virgin where i am is an non congested area so i get Full download speeds, on 10-20 no speed issues apart form daily throttling limits (but no monthly download cap like other ISPs do) there still an F up at one of 50mb Broadband Pipe providers that VM use (virgin network connects to the main Internet backbone using an bandwidth provider, the 10-20mb service does not use the 50mb provider) that can cut the speed down to 2mb and do 80% packetloss at the same time for 5-10 mins then it goes back to full speed for long time, i would not mind the speed drop but its the packet loss i can not handle
Welcome to the Internet, Ofcom.