News - ‘Frustrated’ consumers want broadband advertising overhaul

[joel_spencer]

Also virgin shouldn't be complaining about misleading speeds when they send round leaflets advertising cable speeds in non cable areas. They took my details to sign me up, including bank ones, then never got back to me, a few weeks later I get a letter saying no we can't do it but how about our rubbish adsl service.

[FoxdieUK]

I use virgin myself. But i've been frustrated for a friend who was paying for the "up to" 8mb service. He was getting a 3mb service in reality. He thought he'd upgarde to the "up to" 20mb service to increase his speed. Unsuprisingly the speed remained the same at "3mb". Clearly the limiting factory wasn't the bandwidth controls, but his distance from the exchange and line quality. The frustration came that BT were more than happy to accept his upgrade request, and therefore payment knowing full well that no increase in speed would come of the change.

Virgin however have been excellent, i recently downgraged from the 20mb service, to the 10mb service becuase of budget constraints. I am hitting the throttling bechmark more often, but even when throttled im achieving better speeds than him.

[Defiant]

There is no throttling on the 50MB package.. yet. And d/ling 20-40GB/month isn't that likely to cause throttling unless you go over the threshold for peak hours (10am-9pm, bar 3pm-4pm). See here.

That makes me annoyed. That throttling is in place on a cable network, I dont get throttled one bit with Bethere and ADSL weather I download 5 or 30 GBs a night.
Connection speed isnt really the big bone now, its this use of the word unlimited and throttling of the services they are trying to promote as being a massive figure that just happens to be a fourth of your nice figure at peak times when you want to use that nice massive figure.

Internet companies are some slimmy lot.

[MonkeyL]

The frustration came that BT were more than happy to accept his upgrade request, and therefore payment knowing full well that no increase in speed would come of the change.

That is a clear breach of Ofcoms: Voluntary Code of Practice: Broadband Speeds, which state that you must be given a clear indication of the speed you will most likely recieve at the point of sale. BT are signed up to the code.

[sammorris]

I thought so - loads of people complain about virgin throttling people who use lots of bandwidth, but one of my mates has the virgin 50 meg package and uses 600-700GB a month of bandwidth and says he's never been throttled. I wondered if the 50 meg package had different restrictions, it seems I was right

BT rang me up to sell me Infinity, since it's active in my area, I asked what their FUP was. 100GB they said. What an absolute joke. If they are guaranteed a monopoly, FTTC is ruined for the vast majority of us. 100GB is so low you literally cannot use it properly. The only way you can use 100GB of bandwidth max every month is by doing things that are comparatively irrespective of bandwidth, i.e. web browsing and video streaming. The guy nearly had a fit when I told him I regularly use 300GB a month, sometimes 400, and that's with 7 meg internet, imagine how it might increase with 40!

[crossy]

I thought so - loads of people complain about virgin throttling people who use lots of bandwidth, but one of my mates has the virgin 50 meg package and uses 600-700GB a month of bandwidth and says he's never been throttled. I wondered if the 50 meg package had different restrictions, it seems I was right

700GB/month - wtf!
Oh, and as others have said, the 50meg service from VM isn't throttled at the moment (think it might be once it stops being the "XL" service)

BT rang me up to sell me Infinity, since it's active in my area, I asked what their FUP was. 100GB they said. What an absolute joke. If they are guaranteed a monopoly, FTTC is ruined for the vast majority of us. 100GB is so low you literally cannot use it properly. The only way you can use 100GB of bandwidth max every month is by doing things that are comparatively irrespective of bandwidth, i.e. web browsing and video streaming. The guy nearly had a fit when I told him I regularly use 300GB a month, sometimes 400, and that's with 7 meg internet, imagine how it might increase with 40!

Actually, I think I'd be happy with 100GB/month - okay I'd be happier with 200GB/month cap. I telework and am a Linux bod (so that means ISO downloading) and last time I spoke to VM I was told that I was nowhere near the cap where I'd get zapped for my 10meg service, (which is strange because before I upgraded the TV to the V+ box I was getting b/w throttled).
Okay I don't do online gaming (because I'm just hopeless canon fodder) but I do download XBox demos though. I also don't use streaming video to the PC a lot, (but the kids do), nor do I torrent. I'm guessing that on the other hand you're a gaming, video watching, torrenting d00d ...
People keep (rightly?) slagging off BT and VM for poor reach or substandard rollouts, but what's the alternative? Get the government to treat it as a 'national resource' and they run it - to my mind that's guaranteed to give a worse service!

[sammorris]

Online gaming doesn't use an enormous amount of bandwidth, if you're in a permanently active VOIP conversation (i.e. something like Skype rather than, say teamspeak) and playing a game with several players you might average about 20-25KB/s download and perhaps 10-12KB/s upload. If you did this 6 hours a day every day of the month, that still works out to be 13-16GB a month download and 6-8GB a month upload. This particular month I was helping someone rebuild their FTP server so I actually used 50GB of upload, which isn't common, but due to the various things I download I reckon last month I downloaded somewhere in the region of 250-300GB.

[Rob_B]

400GB is a lot of 'linux distros'

Not sure what I use to be honest, demos are probably the biggest hog but even then it's only a few per month for the PC/PS3, doubt I use over 25GB

100GB is so low you literally cannot use it properly. The only way you can use 100GB of bandwidth max every month is by doing things that are comparatively irrespective of bandwidth, i.e. web browsing and video streaming.

I'd imagine the vast majority of people use nowhere near 100GB/month, unless Infinity is aimed at big downloaders?

[sammorris]

Because I hate streams so much, I take to downloading stuff I'd otherwise get from youtube, that takes up quite a lot of bandwidth.

[Avenger1324]

I'm getting about half the advertised rate from O2, though that is double the speed I was getting through Orange who were also claiming the same "up to" rate.

Orange were a nightmare to leave as they chase you month after month for unpaid fees, despite giving the full period of notice, requesting the leaving code and doing all the transfers properly.

[sammorris]

Lol, well, if you've legally moved on, set fire to the bills and block their email address, job done

You laugh, but we used to be AOL customers a long time ago, ugh.
After 8 weeks of trying to get a MAC code, and either getting one and being told it was invalid by the new ISP or being given 'oh, there appears to be some problems with the systems' (but their grammar was even worse than that), or being told 'we wouldn't like you to leave', we decided enough was enough. Blissfully, we still had two phone lines, from back in the old 56k days where you needed two to use phone and internet at the same time. So we phoned BT to disconnect the second phone line, blocked the credit card payments, and rewired the sockets in the house ourselves. Et voila, no evidence of AOL existing. We then proceeded to move to UKOnline, who I was pretty content with for the 5 years we were using them. However, lack of any sort of new products from them, rumours they were going to be axed as a company in favour of Sky broadband, them still using PPP authentication, and requiring a new 12-month contract to switch to ADSL2 caused me to migrate from them to Be. That move was trouble-free.