What about connection meddling?

It doesn't matter if Virgin is twice the speed of the others, if you actually use it then it will throttled to death.

May I be the first to say

"No shit, Sherlock"?

Hm. Average of what?

Where I live, the exchange is 4.9KM away and i'm on the boundary of Sheffield.

The max speed I get is 1.1MBit a sec and BT say I should get 2, although i'm on Sky and the max they can thrown down the line is 1.4 and it falls over all the time.

So, besides waiting for FTTC, I get the feeling the area which I live in is going to have slow ADSL for a while to come, with no choice as we get hardly any 3G signal and no cable.

What a surpise!

The tories threaten to do away with ofcom and they start doing their job...

Hmmmmm

And the response from Ofcom "sorry, we don't care, we're mates with the guys that run these companies and that one there took me to El Bulli the other week so he's in my good books, ooh, a new car... for me? You shouldn't have..."

lol

Even ofcom are incapable of doing the figures . I'm on Orange and part of the sam knows hardware monitoring project. My speed 6.5mbps . My line sync is 8096kbps from a possible 10368kbps . Not too shabby for a non Adsl2+ line really .

The problem is the lines used for adsl are too old and susceptible to all sorts of interference. Fibre optic is better well now theres a shocker ......

Whats seriously out of kilter is peoples perceptions . Most people failed to notice the "upto" bit usually written in a tiny font when they signed up so when their 8mbps line only gives them 3mbps or less they get peeved .

Caveat Emptor - Always check what you are likely to get first . Then you won't have a hissy fit later .

Phone line length...

I heard this story on the radio this morning, and all the while the blame for poor performance has been put at the ISP, not the technology or the line length. No matter how good your provider, if you're on ADSL and your line length is a good few miles you will never get a fast connection. How that can be the ISP's fault (other than BT) when they don't supply the phone wire?

Money back?

The odd small slow down is understandable due to contention etc, but in most cases customers are NEVER getting the full advertised rate.

So then, if you're only getting say an average of 70% advertised speed, why don't you get a 30% discount on your bill?

For any other commodity, if I were to order 100 units, and the supplier could only give me 80, I wouldn't be expecting to pay for the 20 that I'm not getting!

To be fair...

When I moved to O2, they stated quite clearly that I would not get the premium rate, they estimated my top speed, and made my expectations very clear.

My actual speed sometimes exceeds their estimated speed. It rarely goes much below their speed.

So why would I complain?

Sad day

When Virgin is the best ISP in your country.

I would never suggest BT are underperforming on purpose so they can get an extra 50p off everyone to improve their services but ya kno.

RE: What about connection meddling?

Exactly who cares what speed the connection is if your not allowed to use it anyway because of a "Fair Usage Policy" on a "UNLIMITED" connection.

I would rather they where all honest and said sorry we can't supply a 16mbps connection "UNLIMITED" but you can have a guaranteed 2mbps connection with no fair usage crap.

If we could judge all the ISP offers by speed and real "UNLIMITED" for that speed we may be able to make a proper informed choice about the provider without having to read the fair usage policy document with its "we may" and "reserve the right" based on some flexible network management policy.

In conclusion regulate there asses properly

No kidding eh?

That we don't get the full 8 meg. Well Duh!

Until there is Fibre to the green box in your street then that is about as mush as you are going to get especially if you are more than 1km from the Exchange. I don't think the Fibre will get much further than that in my lifetime.

And Virgin Media? Well that shows down to a virtual standstill in my area every evening. So much so, the kids next door piggback onto my WLan (with my permission) to get decent surfing speeds.

There is nothing really new in this report. In fact most of the UK Computer mags could have written it themselves from the articles they have published over the past year.

Yawn...

It's not long ago that twin bonded ISDN was the mutt's maracas. I certainly ain't complaining that I'm getting as much as 5.6Mbps on my BT line. Stop downloading pron and get down the pub.

Half the story

Whilst the headline figures are important, OFCOM (and, it seems, El-Reg's coverage of it) misses probably the most important factor of the connection speed.

Even if you get an 8.7Mb/s connection to the ISP, if they've over-sold their upstream bandwidth you aren't going to get that. I know people on Virgin that are lucky to get the equivalent of 200Kb/s rather than 8Mb/s. Their "link speed" is still stupidly high, it's just that Virgin's internal network can't handle it.

BT have a similar problem (as reported on here) with the iPlayer specifically - access is capped.

Therefore, OFCOM really should look at something like the samknows checks instead of just the pretty numbers.... And to make it worse, they were involved!

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/performance.php?page=performance-introduction

"guaranteed 2mbps connection with no fair usage crap"

"you can have a guaranteed 2mbps connection with no fair usage crap."

There are ISPs that will do that, even outside of LLU areas. You probably won't have heard of them, and you almost certainly won't like the price. Leechers are not welcome these days, and even frequent iPlayer users are looking like an endangered species.

Prior to BTw introducing "capacity based charging" a 2Mb line was typically £40 a month to the end user, with truly unlimited usage. A 512k line would be rather less. The dominant factor in the price was the "last mile" line rental, not the interconnect bandwidth (the "Centrals") between ISP and BT.

Then BTw propose their "capacity based charging" which makes the "line rental" independent of speed, but massively increases the cost of interconnect between ISP and BTw. This inevitably leads to a certain amount of unhappiness among people who can see where it's leading, but Ofcon being clueless let it go right ahead, and the result is of course "traffic management" on cheap tariffs or ridiculous prices on truly "unlimited" tariffs.

Thanks Ofcom.

FUCKING FINALLY.

This is exactly what Ofcom is for. They know they're for the chop and have decided start doing the job they were originally created to do.

Regulators need to be aggressive, they cannot take the "working with" the company stance, they can't consider the companies in market they regulate "clients" or "customers". They are there to weild the big stick and protect the consumer, not to work with marketing deptartments to make sure their lies have the small print required to make them legal.

There can be no more accepting money from the companies they're supposed to be overseeing, because in the private sector it's called bribery.

Also somebody explain exactly what the fuck they need branded water/mousemats etc for...

Fuck em, get rid of the useless bastards. Too little too late.

Missing the point *again*

The issue here isn't the speed you *can* get *sometimes*. The issue is the speed you get when you *want* it.

Its all very well saying Joe Average gets 3.3Mbits, but if he's only getting (and from bitter experience with BT) <256KBits at "peak" times (I.e, when he *wants* it) then his usable speed is only 256KBits, which is next to useless for anything but basic web browsing and email.

I know you only get what you pay for, but ISPs should be compelled to lay out exactly what you *are* paying for *before* you sign up.( I.e both the maximum and *minimum* speeds you can expect as well as AUPs and throttling regimes that are used on that service).

Shame.

I pay 50 euros per month for 25Mb down and 5Mb up, here in Duesseldorf, and actually get slightly more than that. Not *much* more, it has to be said, but it brings a smile to my face to see that the figures are at least what they say on the shiny brochure, and not less. My fiancee's family in eastern Germany only get about 768Kb, but that is truly amazing, considering they live at least a 20 minute drive from civilization. I got them a Speedport W920V router for Christmas, and as the cost of going with broadband was the same as the 20Kb AOL connection they had, they switched - and never looked back. VoIP was another bonus - we now talk for free, courtesy of sipgate. When T-Com upgrades the area with VDSL (and they will - telecoms infrastructure is taken quite seriously over here, and especially in Eastern Germany, where there is still a lot of infrastructure being upgraded), their speed will almost triple overnight, without any reconfiguration.

If I chose to live nearer to the city centre, I could get 50Mb down and 10Mb up for just 10 euros per month more, but to be honest, 25Mb does the job just fine - even for streaming HD video. For the first time in ages, I actually feel good about what I get for my money - especially since T-Com decided on making the upstream bandwidth something sane like 5Mb instead of the 256Kb I still see in the UK on some "super-fast" connections. E-mails (even big ones with lots of attachments) vanish out of my outbox in a flash, and I sometimes keep my Sun boxen on, and remotely access X applications on them over the net - it's quite fast enough for that. Playing (and even hosting) games is now a reality, rather than a lag-ridden pipedream. Oh, and we even have two DECT handsets at home, which are capable of independently making simultaneous outgoing calls with the same base station (ISDN over VoIP is wonderful!)

I feel sorry for anyone living in the UK, and especially anyone who does not live in suburban London / Birmingham / Manchester / Liverpool - because I've lived in the middle of UK Silicon Valley and had nothing faster than a 56K modem connection available, for a LONG time.

VM's been not bad for me

I have to say I've had VM in the past 8 years in 4 diff counties.. It's speed has always been where it's supposed to be... - throttling offcourse not good but for the mo the 50 Mb platform has no throttling...

Even the 50 M clocked in at 52 Mb .. !! the engineer when he came noted some signal degradation from house to DS and replaced/inspected all the cable ends ...

but he was still surprised the connection was operating at over 50 ... he hadn't seen 50 on any install!!..

VirginMedia

I get a pretty decent speed out of Virgin, about 15Mb/s on downloads, unless I download a large file in which case the speed decreases as the download progresses. What I am more concerned about is the upload speed as I often have to upload large files to my server, and that is pretty slow.

throttling

I generally get 7megs on my 8meg connection (when I test it), unless I want to do something which needs that sort of speed, in which case Orange usually throttle it.

I can't help thinking that they probably prioritise speed test traffic...

the thing is...

There are millions of people out there who have lives and so don't give a flinging monkey poo what their broadband speed is like. The government realise this, ofcom realise this and so do the ISPs. You guys might be all militant but you still have to buy the shitty service because there is no alternative and you know it. In an ideal world blah blah blah blah; you're still the ISP's bitch though.

Now if all the geeks got together and formed a collective who changed ISP to whichever didn't throttle, didn't use Phorm, had good techie customer service... the ISPs would still ignore you because they cater to the hundreds of thousands of retards who want to go on the Sun website and are happy to pay the same as the few thousand nerds who want to rock the shit out of their network.

See?

"Up to"

I can sympathise with ISP's on this; just because it can doesn't mean it will.

Moaning that a service doesn't give as advertised is plainly ridiculous when it says "up to". Do these people also complain about their vehicle's fuel consumption being less than it "could be" ?

No surprises.

No surprises really except I thought the average speed would be lower still. I would be interested to know if it is actually possible to get 8meg from any exchange, as an experiment I found out the postcode for mine and entered it in the BT availability checker and found that even if I lived inside my 8meg exchange I could only get a 6 meg connection.

Tiscali

I'd love to know where the Tiscali customers are that get 3.2 - 3.7 mbit/s.

Probably not Cardiff, where 3 of us unfortunate enough to choose Tiscali got speeds that would shame a 56k modem at peak times, frequent drop-outs and for myself, driven insane by having to "go and reset the router" every time I used YouTube or iPlayer.

We all switch ISP and hey presto, our problems disappear overnight. So it wasn't the router, wasn't the computer, wasn't the phone line, wasn't the cables, wasn't the microfilter.. it was good ol' Tiscali.

But they still had the worst figures of all the ISPs listed, so well done, chumps!

Shock horror

for those of you that understand contention, Rate adaptive serivces, ADSL max, and generally how shit works - well done.

everyone else - http://www.google.com. Do some research.

the services are advertised as "Up to". like my car can do "up to 140mph", but restrictions such as road quality, traffic, the police etc mean i can only get to a certain speed most of the time. You are not "paying for 8 meg baw baw baw QQ" you are paying for a rate adaptive service, it`ll go as fast as it can based on your phone line.

what you SHOULD be concerned about, apart from Phorm, thottling, p2p restrictions, terrorism™ etc, is the fact that the contracts you signed state that your ISP dont even guarantee the service will even work.

"Up to" - so what?!

What's the problem here? The ISPs know what their equipment is capable of, at best. The actual speed you'll get is limited by the length and condition of the wires to your home, which they can't know until they try the connection.

Advertising "Up to" a given speed, with actual speed determined on test, is a perfectly reasonable approach.

Nor surprise that it's worse in rural areas. The defintion of rural is, after all, "not in a city". If you want to live far away from a service supplier, you get worse service. Sheesh, you don't need a PhD to work that out!

This is just the same sort of whinging we get from people who move to live in the country, then moan when they get woken by cock-crow at 5am, and their car gets covered in cow shit when they drive home. If you want city benefits, live in a city.

I live in a rural area. We finally got broadband a few years ago, and I get 2Mbit/s max on an "up to 16Mbit/s" service. I don't complain, it's better & cheaper than the ISDN I had before, and it's more than offset by the other advantages of living surrounded by green fields and clean air.

And, by the way, I'm not in the UK. The UK is no worse then most of the EU, no matter what the "grass is greener" tabloids would have you believe.

Why omit the "less than 2% of market share" companies?

They are the ones that deliver. Forget the big boys - they're too big to be efficient.

We use NamesCo and get over 6Mb on our up to 8Mb line and we're 2km away from the exchange in a rural location. No contention issues either...

@ Soruk

It's not that the blame for your slow line lies on the ISP, it's that the blame for advertising something you can never get lies with them instead. If their connections in reality top out at 6Mb/s, they should be advertising that

It's not "up to" that's the problem

It's that there's no "from" at the bottom end. It reminds me of the tactic adopted by BT way back in the dial up days of only guaranteeing 22 kbps or so so that they could give customers an "extra" line by splitting the existing one while still meeting their connectivity obligations.

Most people are sensible enough to (eventually) realise that the top quoted speed is dependent on a following wind and their packets running downhill. What is needed is some way of formulating the rules so that ISPs are made to quote what one's normal speed range will be for (say) 90% of the time. And not to have the speed range look like a random guess: 0-8Mbps is not acceptable - 4-5Mbps probably is.

Consistency of connection speed is a lot more important than the maximum - the sooner the ISPs lose the weasel tactic of drastically reducing speeds in busy times because they've sold more bandwidth than they actually have, the better. Some reduction is to be expected but some of them have been taking the piss for years.

user equipment speed decrease

Now i do understand that not everyone has the same experience, but my Virgin Media 20mbps service does get very close to exactly what is advertised (about 19.2 or so) this is with the old cable modem I got from them, the new cable modem I got on moving house is clearly not as good, the speed drops to about 18.6. Add a router and speed drops again etc...simply put, there is a slight speed loss on your side of the network from everything. As the report states that the testing hardware was added "direct to the router (see section 4.7)" there will be a substantial drop in performance from both cable modem and router, whether this is a substantially bigger drop than the performance drop for an all-in-one adsl/router/modem supplied with non-cable isps, i don't know, but it will certainly differ by equipment. This also means that virgin dont have much to answer for here without this being taken into account, compared to adsl which struggles to be much more than half as fast as advertised. Some of the VM complainers may well disagree from personal experience, but the report does show 80-90% of full speed for VM. It appears VM should not even be on a comparison list being as borderline as they are - they are as much off their advertised speed as Hard Drives manaufacturers are off their advertised capacity - not close to half the advertised capacity...so the issue really is with adsl generally and its downright lie of "up to 8mbps". No I am no Virgin Media fanboy (let me tell you about my horrific set-up story over a period of 8 months) but I don't think they have the same case to answer.

VM

Last time I had a decent ISP was Pipex before they went hell for leather to fatten themselves up prior to the Tiscali buyout.

Currently with VM's 20MB and it is a pile of wank. I have the bad fortune to live in what their field engineers refer to as a "black" area (i.e. one populated by people who spend their entire time on Skype to their grannies in Poland and never pay their fucking bills) which means no investment in capacity and no FTTC. Plus, as previous posters have said, you get a decent speed (sometimes) until you actually decide to use it. Pish.

ITT: not enough gloating

We're all IT pros right? I can't believe you lot with your sucky 'average' net connections. I pay for 16mb, I get 16mb. I researched, improved everything I could, and yes, when moving house it was a little factor as well.

With ADSL, get yourself some decent wires/filters, a better modem/router, and change the master faceplate - all that will add a few mb no doubt to your speeds...

Junk report

Reading the annexes in the full report shows that they've only tested HTTP over port 80 so they're unlikely to encounter the traffic shaping speed bumps that most ISPs use. I live 500m from my local green box, which is 150m from the main exchange (albeit in a village in the sticks) and my "8mbps" service won't stream or download the BBC iPlayer content (streaming needs 0.5mbps), and YouTube is fairly unusable - all this despite a swathe of speed testing sites reporting 3mbps+. One interesting test was at ThinkBroadband, though, which reported 200kbps.....

Time to move from Shitscali, methinks

Virgin - Another Satisfied Customer

Despite some of the comments above, I get EXACTLY what Virgin promised me - I pay for 10Mbps and that's what I get (1.22 MB/sec downstream). Granted, in the early evening there are often contention issues, but I knew about the contention ratio when I signed up. Oh, and we've suffered about half a day's worth of downtime in 4 years.

Sure, I'd love 100Mbps for £10 a month, but I'm not a child and therefore understand that all that bandwidth actually costs money to build out and service.

If you want the best pornband, choose the company with the most modern network infrastructure.

Is this the same Ofcom

That acted so decisively against services being advertised as 'Unlimited' whilst subjecting the customer to undisclosed limitations?