News - Which? campaigns for minimum broadband speed guarantee

[HEXUS]

Broadband companies accused of making customers pay for spends they never get.

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[DanceswithUnix]

Guaranteed speed doing what?

If people are getting poor speeds and service, perhaps they shouldn't be getting the cheapest deal they can find.

[MorrisR]

I have some sympathy with post "perhaps they shouldn't be getting the cheapest deal they can find".
My Virgin up to 20 Mb was usually delivering >19, and now recently upgraded to 50 Mb is usually >51.
However, certainly not the cheapest; service has been good to date though.
But I certainly do recognise that this not available everywhere.

[TheAnimus]

Err, wouldn't it be better if they just campaigned against firms being allowed to have such long lock-ins on the contracts?

If you live in middle of nowhere, with shoddy wiring, well there isn't much they can do about it.

[crossy]

We’re calling on broadband providers to give you the speed and service you pay for as we discover around three in five people experience problems with their broadband.

Our research shows that nearly half of broadband customers have suffered slow speeds, with six in ten having to put up with these sluggish speeds frequently. And there’s more – many people just aren’t getting the speeds they were promised.

...

We want broadband providers to give you written speed estimates at the start of your contract, and to let you exit that contract without penalty if they fail to meet those speeds. We also want them to fix any loss of connection as speedily as possible and to refund you if problems persist.

The quote above is from Which's campaign page - and I'm less than impressed. Written speed estimates? Last time I checked, BT did that - they said that on their "10mbs" service I could expect to see 3mbs on average. But since I didn't go with BT then I can't tell how accurate that estimate is/was.

Big problems I've got with speed estimates is whether they'll have legal values. So, if Joe Public gets an "estimate" from TalkTalk saying that he'd get 20mbs and he gets 15mbs, does he have cause to sue? And that's ignoring the small matter that, like the road network, what speed YOU get is dependent on so many other factors - not least of which being which website you're trying to access.

Households are also suffering from poor customer service. A quarter of people who reported a loss of service and had it resolved waited two days for this, and around one in ten had no internet for a week or more.

Erm, if you're talking about a fix that needs an engineer visit then a 48Hr response is one I'd be content with in a non-business scenario. As someone said on Hexus last year, "if you want a guaranteed SLA, then get a business broadband contract instead". On the other hand a 5/7 days without service is definitely a cause for some reasonable compensation I'd suggest.

Err, wouldn't it be better if they just campaigned against firms being allowed to have such long lock-ins on the contracts? If you live in middle of nowhere, with shoddy wiring, well there isn't much they can do about it.

Agree totally. Actually in the context of what Which are saying I would have thought it more helpful if they campaigned to be able to walk away - with no penalty - if your sustained speeds were a good percentage less than the "headline" figure. As as example, if you're getting less than 60% of your "rated" speed then you should be allowed to cancel your contract.

[pastymuncher]

Isn't this more to do with one price fit's all? Take me for instance. I pay for a "up to 20mb" service yet i can only get 6.5-6.75mb (when they decide to fix my line fault anyway). Why should i pay the same price as someone who can get the full 20mb? It's bad enough that we pay more and can't get the best deals due to not being in a big city. We were supposed to get ADSL2 3 or 4 years ago but BT binned that idea and we are just left with ADSL Max. No doubt we will also be among the last (if we ever get it) to get fibre as well.

As for customer service, Plusnet are doing my head in at the moment. We have had a ongoing fault where the speed keeps dropping off from 6.5mbps to less than 2mbps since November. We just keep going around in circles. I have had two engineer visits, both of which confirmed there was no fault my end so they refer back to Plusnet who then end up referring it back to them.

[cheesemp]

I wish they could do something. I use to get 14Mb ADSL in Southampton city (although BT insisted I got 8Mb even when I left.) I then got 40Mb infinity at my new house in a small town (ADSL was 4Mb), was told I'd get 30Mb but only get 20Mb which feels no faster than the old ADSL but double the cost. If you got roughly what you paid for I feel a lot happier about it.

[Odeas]

Before I moved to fibre, I'd get around 3-4Mb regardless of the package I was on.
Most broadband providers do state that for my postcode I'm expected around 4-8Mb so it is fairly close, although it was very annoying not to get the speeds I was paying for.

I ended up moving to virgin fibre without a phone line as it's something I never use and my speeds have been fantastic since and very little difference in cost. Now get a fairly solid 25-30+Mb which will be upgraded to 50Mb at some point.

I'd rather where the estimated speeds for your house are significantly below the speeds stated for that plan something should be offered such as a shorter contract or lower monthly costs, they can't really put a 'minimum broadband speed guarantee' in place and it make much difference. We guarantee you a minimum of 4Mb on your 20Mb line? Wow! Until the exchange gets updated or another one is available closer the speeds can't really improve on a non-fibre line.

If I actually received a decent 3G signal in my house I'd actually get better speeds tethering 3G than my non-fibre broadband, nevermind 4G!

[Ttaskmaster]

Err, wouldn't it be better if they just campaigned against firms being allowed to have such long lock-ins on the contracts?
If you live in middle of nowhere, with shoddy wiring, well there isn't much they can do about it.

I'd not object if they campaigned to get decent wiring put in for us middle-of-nowhere folks, while they were at it. The exchange was upgraded yonks back and we're on the route to some pretty large population areas, yet there are not even plans to upgrade beyond the 'up to 5MBs' speeds by which we currently get a maximum of their estimated 1.5meg.

[crossy]

I'd not object if they campaigned to get decent wiring put in for us middle-of-nowhere folks, while they were at it.

If you're in Reading - which your location field thingy says - then you've got no justification to call yourself "middle of nowhere". "pastymuncher" - in scenic Aberlour - has a lot more call on that badge of "honour". Of course, even in the centre of cities they can have crappy wiring - or in my case some dullard driving their heavy van over a pedestrian-rated manhole and breaking it.

And I'm on the outskirts of a town, so I'm also not m-o-n either.

[aidanjt]

If Which? is going to push ISPs to do anything, it should be to expand their network capacity according to demand, rather than cram customers into their capacity.

[MrComputerSaint]

If you live in middle of nowhere, with shoddy wiring, well there isn't much they can do about it.

I agree, people get "up to" speeds. I used to live 7km from the exchange and my ADSL max was anywhere from 500k to 2.2Meg. It was upto 8Meg, I didn't pay for 8Meg.

My db figure on my line was on the threshold of 61 - 63 db! There was nothing I could do about it. I'm not going to hold the provider to ransom over a written estimate. Simply because I know that there is also line degradation that can occur over the years - which BT fix anyway if it gets to bad.

I think Which? is just causing more work for providers and as said above, a campaign to get people onto lesser capacity services makes more sense.

[keithwalton]

Line speed is only half the problem and one that is mostly out of control of the isp.

Network congestion and traffic shaping however is the isp's deal.

A friend of mine used be with AOL for many year and had acceptable speed as they were only a stones through away from an old exchange (bt only adsl exchange serving 500 premises) so on an up to 8 meg connection there line speed was 8 meg.

Then talk talk brought out aol and slowly there speed plummeted to next to nothing at peak times.

I spent a few hours there trying to work out why it was going slow and couldn't find anything wrong.

Talk talk's customer support were pretty useless and blamed the fact they were using wireless or that the machine had a virus on it. They then flicked a magic switch somewhere as the speed test suddenly jumped upto the full 8 meg which lasted all of 24 hours before reverting back to snails pace (100kbit)
another support call yielded another magical speed boost for 24 hours. A week later my friend left switched providers!

[scaryjim]

... Why should i pay the same price as someone who can get the full 20mb? ...

Because it probably costs the ISP exactly the same amount to provide you with a 6mbps service as it does to provide someone else with a 20mbps service! Why should you have extra money spent on you because your line condition and distance from cabinet prevent you from benefiting from the full speed of the network?

There are all sorts of issues with this whole "minimum speed" thing, not least the question of minimum speed to where? If I get my line speed tested back to my local cabinet, or even my local exchange, chances are my line speed will read at the full estimate I was given when I moved here (about 55mbps, I think). Once you go out of that narrow, controllable channel, my line speed will probably drop, but how much of that is within the ISPs control? It will depend on the congestion of the core network and also the line speeds provided by the destination site's ISP. Basically, it strikes me as being way too complicated to police.

What really needs to happen is there needs to be proper nationalised investment in the core infrastructure, which will ensure everyone can get better speeds. Openreach aren't my ISP - I have no contract with them - but they are probably the company that can have the single biggest impact on my broadband service.

[Brian224]

How about a simple right to cancel if your tested speed is less than a fixed percentage (perhaps 50%) of the claimed speed?

[crossy]

What really needs to happen is there needs to be proper nationalised investment in the core infrastructure, which will ensure everyone can get better speeds. Openreach aren't my ISP - I have no contract with them - but they are probably the company that can have the single biggest impact on my broadband service.

Nationalised investment? Don't think that you'd get very far using that term with this government. Basically what you mean is "give BT a pot of cash that they can go and waste". I'm one of these dumb/naive people that think we'd all be better off if there was pay-by-results for these kinds of contracts.

Of course, you can argue these days that networking is a civic resource (like roads, rail, power, etc) so maybe responsibility for it needs to be with the government - not that this'd ever happen either.

How about a simple right to cancel if your tested speed is less than a fixed percentage (perhaps 50%) of the claimed speed?

Agree with this - but only if it's a right to cancel with no penalties and the speed test is based on average speeds to a range of destinations. You - as a consumer - have got to be able to run those tests yourself.

At one point Virgin were handing out speed test software - maybe coerce the other ISP's do to something similar. So the if ISP's software is saying that you're getting 2Mb/s over your "8Mb/s" line then you've got the evidence to be able to "walk". Then again, there's no guarantee, in a lot of cases, that you won't get the same poor deal from someone else if the problem is hardware at your end. And if you've got a bad line then you can't really expect the ISP's to offer you a tailored price - using the example above , giving you a 75% discount over the normal 8Mb/s price.