I have noticed that my BT line conenction rate has been dropping over the past few months and then miraculously went up over xmas which points to contention in my mind as people may spend less time on the internet at xmas. In any event, my download rate (via speedtest.net) remained constant sub 2MBps during the day and went up progressively until the wee hours when it rose sharply. that's the ISP throttling. I think BT are doing this because everyone is buying homehubs as a wireless survey of my street shows.

I'm leaving BT soon with a hope that my new unbundled provided can give me the estimated 4Mbps (twice that of BT down the same wire).

Are these figures corrected for the sync speed a customer gets? If they're a long way from the exchange and can only sync at 1M, it's not exactly the ISPs fault if they're not getting 1M, is it? A fairer test would be, what percentage of the sync speed is the customer getting [minus 13% for ATM overheads].

You have to wonder how many people on '8Mb' DSL are connecting their modems via telephone extensions made from el-cheapo unsheilded cable and not to their BT master socket. I recently replaced the ~15m of phone extension in my flat with CAT6 cable and this roughly doubled the speeds I got in various online speed tests.

My router connects at 5mb my transfer speeds rarely score over 1 in any direction, it's the back end that really matters.

At the end of the day people are paying for a service they are not getting. "Upto 8 MBps" sets an expectation that it is possible to get an 8MBps speed even though technically it may not be.

Incidentally, the argument about distance from the exchange is also dodgy as most (certainly in my area) of the copper has now been replaced by fibre to what was the street cabinet (those green boxes). The ISPs continue to use this as an excuse to deliver lower speeds whilst still charging you for a premium rate service.

I don't think it's too bad really, I'm sure the BBC version of this article stated that on average people receive 85% of what their line is capable of which isn't really that terrible. Network congestion is the issue that needs to be sorted out.

from the ISPs who insist that speedtests aren't accurate and their networks are shining beacons of ultra-fast technology amidst a quagmire of mediocre kit.

My virgin "up to 20Mb" connection has gone from an average speed of 16Mb last January to about 3.5 now. Calling their Indian call center just results in a stirring script reading along the lines of "have you tried turning your modem off and on again? have you tried rebooting your PC? maybe you should try again in an hour, it might be better then."

Get 2Mb until the 1GB transfer cap, then get 1Mb. Exactly as advertised.

Sincerely,

Urban Virgin Customer

I pay just £10/month for 2Mb Virgin Media and really do almost always seem to get 2Mb downloads, but only something like 168Kb downloads!

They should have to advertise either an average of the two i.e. 1.1Mb or advertise it as 2000/186Kb Broadband or something like this.

Bob Greenwood they are getting teh eastenders onibus edition on Iplayer hehehe

Damn, Oliver beat me to it! :-)

It won't be long before Virgin Media comes out and says "It's not us guv, it's not our fault" and other crap excuses behind spin and exclusion term ridden claims. Bottom line is that simple clarity is not forthcoming and the ISPs generally don't like being forced to be open.

Of course, OFCOM lacks cojones of any sort so won't actually DO anything about the situation.

You are not alone. Many BT Customers are experiencing slowdowns after 5pm weekedays and at various times at weekends. It's almost like flicking a switch - 5pm BOOM! Non BT-Vision customers get throttled so that BT Vision customers can watch neighbours.

paying per Mbps? So an 'up-to 8Mb' connection is priced at, say £8. If you get 2Mbps, you pay £2.

OK, it would mean that customers getting the top speeds would pay more, but it would be fair.

As for me, I get about 17Mbit/s ds sync on my Be line. It should be more, but the copper's cr@p!

I couldn't give a shit what problems the ISP faces in providing internet access -- it's not my problem it's theirs and it's what they are paid for. If they can't deliver a speed they shouldn't advertise it and they shouldn't give a customer the expectation of that speed.

On a related note -- it's about time BT got their fingers out of their arses and replaced the 50 year old bell-wire connected by crocodile clips that they laughably call telephone lines in some areas.

Changing the cables in my house made a big difference to my sync speed, from 12 to 15 (yes I have BE). The sync speed variations are a pain but the traffic shaping that most ISPs use is the real rip off. Transparency is all that we want, so we know what our contention ratio is, what shaping is being done and what line speed to expect.

Usually complete bollocks from the likes of BT who declared that they could see the router connected when it was actually switched off - amazing.

Then there was the "Perhaps you need to re-install Windows" on a Mac - duh.

Theres a number of issues:

On one end you have Joe Public (oft refferred to as 'the great unwashed' in El Reg forum) who knows that broadband should equate to faster than dialup & will opt in for any crap so long as its advertised on TV or someone rings them once a week until they say OK.

Then you have the providers who will generally screw as much as they can from Joe Public because they exploit their ignorance & would contend at 100:1 if they could.

Then theres Offcom the toothless quango whos definition of broadband is something faster than 150Kb/s and takes about 5 years to wake up to the painfully obvious

Then theres the old copper string thats been around for years

No wonder 'broadband' in the UK is so crap!

Pipex 1mb LLU is SET at 1mb, its not rate adaptive. hence the speed increase

Ahhh the bell wire. I recently snipped those in a friends 'new build' flat, and doubled her download speeds immediately. This is despite it being one of those 'clever' master sockets with a transformer and capacitors in for 'smoothing'.

Still, my house is connected via a five hundred year old piece of copper, (well, the bits that BT use are connected - the bell wire isnt!) and I'm about two miles from the exchange, but I'm still getting a happy 5 gigabits a second when I torrent in my, uh, linux iso's.

up to 8gigabit - getting five, that'll do! I only pay 7.50 a month for that, bonus!

Alternatively, pay by the number of gigabytes downloaded.

However, I do take issue with the term unlimited being used to describe limited services.

Judging by the average I'm doing quite well getting between 2.5 and 3.5 Mb/s most of the time (plusnet estimate it at 2 Mb/s) ... I'm a fair few miles from the exchange but things did improve when I replaced the front of the BT master socket with one with a built-in filter ... got an extra few db which helped stabilize my line.

I'm now waiting for the ADSL2+ WBC upgrade for the 21st Century network to hit my exchange and according to BT that will be on 31st March 2011 .. yeah only 27 months away by which time what will the average French or German BB speed be?

Ah well I'll have to be patient again ... there is a cable box (diamond cable as was) 300 or so feet from my house and was laid 7 years ago and has never been lit up .. but you never know .. oh wait there is a recession 8-(

....that the rest of the UK cannot get their promised 8 meg. I get 512k and had to argue with BT for 2 years to get it, apparently my exchange only holds 50 broadband connections. So, whilst they are busy updating some lines with all sorts of fancy trial gear, they seem to have completely overlooked my area of rural Scotland.

The even worse thing is, for those poor suckers in my area who are not one of the 50 lucky ones, there is no proper que system. Works like this:

You phone up for broadband and they say yes it's available in your area.

They book you in and give you a go live date some 2 weeks later.

In 2 weeks time you get a letter saying there are no available slots.

You phone back and they say. "We will phone you when there is an available slot"

3 months go by, no word. You phone them back and they say "sorry, we should have phoned you by now. I will deal with this personally and I assure you that we will phone you this time"

3 months go by, no word. You phone back and are given the same bollocks.

In the meantime 10 new people have moved into the area and 5 of them got lucky and got broadband.

You phone up and complain and they apologise and say there is nothing they can do to ensure you are next on the list.

You then have to phone up and order broadband every 2 weeks, wait for the letter saying it is not available and phone and order again. Eventually you get lucky.

Small bonus: I have 20 or so home hubs they sent me for each any every time i ordered broadband. 1 every 2 weeks. Ebay?

.

I'm happy to pay say £10 pcm for "up to 8MB" speed

So long as they accept pro-rata £1.25 /MB delivered speed

The ISPs & the Regulator are too cosy with each other.

Perhaps we could have official labels like the ones that tell you the official MPG of cars?

Oh. Yes. Tsk They're bullshit too......

I live in Milton Keynes where they laid cables made out of dental floss, so I never stand a chance of getting much above 2Mb unless I move to a house next door to the exchange. Actually I even lived in a house 100 metres from an exchange once but my phone line went all the way around my estate and part of another and was 4km long to the exchange I could almost throw stone at.

The result of this was that I could not get DSL when it was first made available from my local exchange, because the loss on my line was too great.

So a contended 50:1 10Meg service would cost £10 pcm whereas an 8MB contended service (50:1) costs what? £30? £50? pcm.