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Thread: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

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    UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    And in the worldwide broadband speed league the UK sits in 31st place.
    Read more.

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    Grass Grows, Wind Blows, Fire burns...oh, sorry thought we were stating the obvious

    </sarcasm>

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    MCRN Tachi Ttaskmaster's Avatar
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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    Average?
    Heck, try 0.7Mbps...!

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    Quote Originally Posted by Ttaskmaster View Post
    Average?
    Heck, try 0.7Mbps...!
    If we take your BB away we can increase the UK average so it's probably best to stay quiet.

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    Where I live fiber was sorted around a year and a half ago but max speed is 40Mbps, our average speed though is around 18Mbps during the day (logging into router it says it is connected at around 23 but wiring in to the router you never get that) if the weather is bad it drops to half that and from around 4pm tilll 10pm it drops to around 7Mbps if bad weather and the usual hammering the network gets at that time of day.

    Trouble round here is that there is very little competition to Sky and BT, yeah you have things like Talk Talk etc but nothing has really been done to improve the network or even sort out what they call superfast which is upto 80Mbps. It is annoying that our local council at the time Virgin was still known as Comcast refused to subsidise the installation of their fiber network so it never happened, they have recently started installing Virgin in outllying areas so we are hoping that it will head our way in the next year or so. If that does happen then BT and Sky are REALLY going to have to pull their fingers out.

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    All I see is a list of countries in order of ability to download pirated content the quickest

    For legitimate, domestic use, 16Mbps is fine. Gaming, surfing and a couple of simultaneous HD streams are possible with that.

    And bearing in mind this is an average, many people will be getting quite a bit more than 16Mbps.

    ..Having said that, I wouldn't want to swap it for my current 210Mbps Fibre connection.

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    Quote Originally Posted by Corky34 View Post
    If we take your BB away we can increase the UK average so it's probably best to stay quiet.
    If you give me FTTP, you can increase the average and use me in marketing to show what an awesome company you are to your customers...
    A double-win, vesus an empty victory and an increase on your lost customer count...?

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    Quote Originally Posted by Bagpuss View Post
    For legitimate, domestic use, 16Mbps is fine.
    </snip>
    ..Having said that, I wouldn't want to swap it for my current 210Mbps Fibre connection.
    Feeling some double standards there... or at least one-and-a-half standards?

    Also, who do I talk to to trade in my 1.4Mbps for some 16Mbps action?

    Last edited by Ozaron; 08-08-2017 at 02:42 PM. Reason: Hall of fame evidence

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    Now that there's all this 4k with HDR around, they recommend 24Mbps to stream properly. So we need to up things before we get a '4k ready' sticker for the country.

    Another reason why 'physical media is dead' gets short shrift from me.

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    Quote Originally Posted by Bagpuss View Post
    And bearing in mind this is an average, many people will be getting quite a bit more than 16Mbps.
    Getting around that reported on the router but it doesn't stop streaming a single show buffering during peak times. Netflix is fine (I guess they just quickly swap to a lower rate seamlessly) but Now TV or Crunchy Roll have problems. Annoying paying for the first tier fibre but getting a speed lower than ADSL (though that connected at about 5Mbps.

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    Quote Originally Posted by Ozaron View Post
    Also, who do I talk to to trade in my 1.4Mbps for some 16Mbps action?
    Depends if anyone offers such a service in your area.
    Some places only have one option for service provider, despite what other providers claim until they actually do a line check.

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    Quote Originally Posted by Ttaskmaster View Post
    Average?
    Heck, try 0.7Mbps...!
    Is that on ADSL? I used to get that in my last house, 4.7km of rusty wire from Palmer Park Exchange despite the house being nothing like that far away. Connection was so good half the phone conversations consisted of shouting "Pardon?!" at people over the crackle. Got it almost up to 3Mbps before I left by fitting a DSL splitter to the master socket rather than using the plug in dongles, chopping the obsolete bell wire to the extensions and bizarrely by changing the PSU on the router, so if you haven't tried fiddling with it it could be worth a go. Just looked on samknows.com and it looks like they have FTTC there now, perhaps BT were just waiting for me to leave

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    When we moved to our current house last October, Sky suggested I would get up to 30Mbps which I was OK with because we had that at our last place and it was always more than adequate. They also guaranteed a minimum of 18 or 20Mbps. When we got there we were getting nothing like that. I used the Sky router for a bit so that it would settle down and get some stability before switching to my Asus AC1900 unit, but it was dreadfully slow, flaky and unreliable. This was a pain for my wife who works from home.

    To their credit, Sky were very helpful. They identified a problem at the cabinet (which for us is quite a long way away over the A30 in an industrial estate - I live in a rural hamlet) and had Openreach go and fix it. That showed a slight improvement but still not enough, so they sent one of their own engineers out. Turns out the builder of the house installed the master socket and was a bit of a plank. They removed the bell wire (seriously, that thing makes a huge difference and you don't need it: Disconnect it from your master socket and any extensions you might have modems plugged into), fitted a decent splitter to the master and hey presto I was up to 19 or 20Mbps up and 3.5-4Mbps down. It's not amazing but it's enough for working from home, streaming in HD and general use. I consider myself lucky that I'm close enough to a town with fibre and therefore a cabinet with it even though I live in the countryside. Barely 3 miles from me are properties which can only get dial up, I kid you not.

    Unbundlers are not the problem here - in fact quite the opposite as they are now allowed to send out their own engineers to fix some things. The problem is Openreach and under-investment in installing adequate cabinets or alternative solutions such as FTTRN.

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    Oh, I'm sorry but "reports" like this are complete, unmitigated drivel.

    For a start, what do they mean by average?

    Mean, median, mode?

    If they mean "mean", do they mean arithmetic mean, geometric mean, harmonic mean?

    Weighted or unweighted, and if weighted, how?

    Secondly, are very likely FAR more significantly, what about sample selection?

    If this is a survey of the entire population, with those that don't have any broadband at all rated at zero, you'll get a very different "average" from a sample taken in a country where a relatively small part of the population have broadband at all, but those that do have very fast BB, which is nice for the elites that have it, and beggar the rest.

    So, what is this "report" actually seeking to measure? Because if I start my own country, populate with with 50 people all of whom have the best BB speed money can buy, I'll top the list.

    If I then add a billion more people, give none of them broadband, but only measure active IPs, I'll still top the list, despite about 99.9999% not having any BB at all. If I then assume that billion have zero kb/s, and do a "mode" or "median" average, it'd show the average as zero. If I do arithmetic mean, it'll give a non-zerocspeed but is so heavily biased by the billion as to almost certain put SaracenVille at the bottom of the list, which accurately reflects neither the 50 with class-leading performance, nor the billion with naff-all.

    Frankly, the nature of statistics is that unless you know what are are seeking to measure, and prive by it, and how they did it (i.e. the methodology) then about all such reports are good for is a sarcastic laugh, then tearing up and chucking in the bin.

    Also, different countries have different population densities, topographies and both countries and BB companies have different objectives, policies and different levels of government funding. Comparing, for instance, Singapore and India is possible, but pointless, given entirely different government policy objectives, national wealth and population levels and distributions. Or compare BT and Virgin, where one has a hell if an infrastructure and customer base headstart but a public access obligation and competitive limits, and the other has a profit motive amd far fewer limitations .... at least, historically.


    Remember .... lies, damned lies and statistics. In that order.



    Note: The survey itself might have a decent methodology, but the reporting misses off all the bits necessary to know, either way.

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    As an example of that "sample selection" point, there's a Stats 101 textbook example where US political pollsters, some decades ago, did a presidental election prediction based entirely in telephone polling, and predicted a huge Republican landslide. After the huge Democratic win in the real thing, the polling post-mortem realised that, in those days, only the wealthy had telephones at all, and by overwhelming majority, they voted Republican. Well, DUH!!!

    Telephone polling is far better today (though still has issues), but in those days, simply by doing a telephone poll, they not only biased but predetermined the outcome.

    They may as well have polled up upgrading henhouse by only asking foxes, or the menu for Christmas dinner by polling Turkeys.

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    Re: UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

    Quote Originally Posted by Bagpuss View Post
    For legitimate, domestic use, 16Mbps is fine. Gaming, surfing and a couple of simultaneous HD streams are possible with that.
    Not even remotely close, especially when you take into account having a doorbell that streams video and voice on a motion sensor, even with a QoS enabled router.

    I really miss my Virgin Fibre connection, anything using this old copper wiring that BT refuses to replace (regardless of being close to the fibre cabinet) is truly and utterly rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishe and third world. It's long overdue that it got replaced instead of trying to get even more out of an outdated and victorian era technology.

    Anyway, sample sizes for the above survey really don't show a true picture of what is going on.

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