News - ‘Frustrated’ consumers want broadband advertising overhaul

[HEXUS]

Virgin Media to publish monthly typical broadband speeds.

Read more.

[kalniel]

The firm said it calculates the typical speeds based on the average speed received by 66 percent of its customers over 24 hours.

Why only 66%? Why aren't they telling us which 66% this is?

[Steve]

How do they measure the speed? If I use the connection for 1 hour a day, how do they figure out the speed I get? Does the 66% include any of the "few percent" of people who get bandwidth throttled?

It's easy to see why Virgin wants to promote this - cable gives guaranteed bandwidth at least up until the backhaul, whereas ADSL the bandwidth between you and the DSLAM could be pretty much anything between zero and the stated maximum.

But until ofcom gets off its bum and comes up with a clear, open to scrutiny policy on how speeds should be measured and stated, this just amounts to a marketing ploy.

[Lee H]

Why only 66%? Why aren't they telling us which 66% this is?

As the other 33% might not be connected as we know what lengths some people go to to save money and unplug EVERYTHING when they are not using them

Speaking of saving money, they've highlighted that cost is first followed by speed second. I'm sorry but anyone who goes on an ISP just because of their "price" is doing it wrong. No wonder we see so many complaints about the cheap mass-market ISPS at night such as talktalk, tiscali etc and it's down to the amount of people on their network grinding everything to a halt and the adslguide forums are a good indication of this as there are always forum posts regarding speed and latency on these ISPS.

This is because ADSL has a contention ratio which is usually between 20:1 and 50:1 per BT guidelines, meaning that 20 to 50 subscribers, each assigned or sold a bandwidth of "up to" 8 Mbit/s for instance, may be sharing 8 Mbit/s of uplink bandwidth.

As such, imagine the speeds you'd get when ALL of the people are online at the same time all trying to download a file from say the BBC iplayer.

Until people understand about contention, ratios and how ADSL works in relation to line length and signal ratio we'll see more and more people complain about how suppliers are advertising incorrectly.

I'll get back under my rock now and be back banging this drum the next time people moan about 'upto' speeds

[LuckyNV]

I find the article bias against ADSL

Independent research by ICM commissioned by Virgin Media

Speed varies greatly because of the way ADSL technology works, no point attacking ISPs for using the "up to" label when its about the best they can do, unless they all change and use "Speed will vary depending on how far you live from your nearest telephone exchange and other factors that might make you sleep if we try to explain it to you" label for all their packages.

How about VM, "enjoy 20Mbps... but only if you don't use it too much."

[kalniel]

Then they should publish contention ratios and speed/100m of distance to the exchange.

Cheap can be good - O2/BE have some of the cheapest packages and also the best latencies etc.

[MonkeyL]

Why only 66%? Why aren't they telling us which 66% this is?

I suspect a proportion of VM's customers are still suffering oversubscription in their areas. Last time I had the misfortune to be in an oversubscribed area my speed was (on average) ~2kb/s on the 10Mb connection. It stayed like this for nearly 8 months, had to resort to getting the dial up modem out for a speed boost.

I don't believe you can trust these figures, or Ofcom. Most of the problems customers experience with regard to miss selling are as a direct result of their unwillingness to regulate the sector.

[Defiant]

You know Bethere my current supplier is the only one have a bit of respect for these days. These connection speed issues aren’t the 'true issue' with the likes of Cable and ADSL. 50mb a sec is worth nothing when they throttle the connections back so much so that it’s not worth a 10mb package.
I also agree that Contention ratios are one of those 'hidden away' bits of DSL services that providers don’t or want to talk about.
Also it would be interesting to know who’s got what deals going with the prioritisation of data flow over networks.

[BobF64]

What I want is the line owner to provide discounts for speeds under the maximum available.

So you pay full price to the ISP, then get a rebate from the line provided (which might be the ISP if its LLU) for every 1Mbps under that speed.

Dont see why people who only get 2Mbps should pay the same per month as those getting the full 8Mbps, for example.

Question is, getting back to customer confusion, how else do you present the information?

"Up to 8Mbps" covers everyone, the only other way I can see is "call for speed estimate", which is even worse as you have no idea what speed is being offered.

[jim]

I'd prefer it if they banned the whole

Unlimited*

*Subject to the terms of our fair use policy, which says you're limited to 10GB per month

nonsense, seeing as it's an outright lie.

I don't mind the speed issue as much really. If your line is only capable of 6Mbps, then there's no point complaining about not getting 8. If your line is capable of 6Mbps, but your ISP provides you with 56k, then fair enough (that would be me).

[matty-hodgson]

Cheap can be good

£7.99 a month for my connection, max speed isn't the best but the latency is unreal .

[keasla]

i have used VMs 10mb 20mb and 50mb and i have never been throttled once and i download about 20gb to 40gb per month

and i get more than what i pay for i am on the 50mb package and this is what i get no matter what time of the day i do the test it is about that speed


test is done with London as Manchester cant always take the 50mb but when i do the test with Manchester i do get 10ms ping

but one bad thing is the router they did give me dropped the speed from over 50mb to just over 20mb

[Percy1983]

Cheapest works for me, my trusty talktalk connection works just fine.

[miniyazz]

i have used VMs 10mb 20mb and 50mb and i have never been throttled once and i download about 20gb to 40gb per month

and i get more than what i pay for i am on the 50mb package and this is what i get no matter what time of the day i do the test it is about that speed

[IMG]http://www.speedtest.net/result/938379897.png[/IMG
test is done with London as Manchester cant always take the 50mb but when i do the test with Manchester i do get 10ms ping

but one bad thing is the router they did give me dropped the speed from over 50mb to just over 20mb

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.

[crossy]

Speaking of saving money, they've highlighted that cost is first followed by speed second. I'm sorry but anyone who goes on an ISP just because of their "price" is doing it wrong.

Couldn't agree more - personally I'd combine price and speed into a "value for money" ratio and then figure on reliability as the second factor in my list. I had a recent argument with a Sky salesdroid who was trying to get me to leave Vermin because he could do an "up to" 20Mb connection for a little over half the price I was paying for my VM 10Mb service. He just wouldn't accept that given that BT claim I can only get 3Mb over my line means that his "superb deal" wasn't that good actually.
As to the reliability - I've had four days outage in nearly 10 years with VM. Which is something I'm very, very pleased with. Especially as my speeds seem to go up around the time I traded my old cable box in for one of the new-fangled V+ things. Both are useful now because I'm a home-worker.

This is because ADSL has a contention ratio which is usually between 20:1 and 50:1 per BT guidelines, meaning that 20 to 50 subscribers, each assigned or sold a bandwidth of "up to" 8 Mbit/s for instance, may be sharing 8 Mbit/s of uplink bandwidth. snipped Until people understand about contention, ratios and how ADSL works in relation to line length and signal ratio we'll see more and more people complain about how suppliers are advertising incorrectly.

So you insist that the "up to" brigade make it clear that "the speed quoted is theoretical, real world speeds are dependent on various factors and may only be a small fraction of the quoted value".
Here's the bit that I don't understand - if, as folks on this area are saying, the cable tech is so markedly superior to ADSL, then how come BT get away with saying that they've got the "best" broadband? (And yes, I did remember that they got a slapdown over the speed claims in that house-buying advert). Doesn't this give VM the bragging rights? And if cable IS so superior then why the heck aren't others (like BT) rolling it out?

(I'm a systems and programming guy, not a network analyst - hence the [possibly stupid?] comments)

[joel_spencer]

BT are rolling out cable, just very slowly as it costs them a lot of money. They've been getting in trouble for years for not replacing the copper cabling with fibre optic but it's cheaper to take the fine than actually do the replacing. The only reason they've started doing it now is that they have been assured a monopoly on the new services.

If BT did their infinity service (their name for cable) without a phone then I might consider it but they refuse to do so so I'll stick with o2s cheaper and superior service.