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back to article Average UK broadband just over half advertised speed

The average downstream speed received by UK households is just 57 per cent of the average advertised rate, according to Ofcom research. Data from the regulator's hardware-based performance monitoring network shows that while the average broadband package is sold as "up to" 7.1Mbit/s, it actually delivers 4.1Mbit/s. The UK …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    @Ian Ferguson

    I'm on Wight Cable too.

    Shifted from a hopeless (and Phormed) BT ADSL service to WC's 8MBit WiMax service.

    Don't get 8MBits, I'm sorry to say. I get *10MBits*

    An ISP that delivers faster speeds than they advertise? Go figure it!

    As to their customer service, well, "quaint" would be the best description, but at least its someone you can understand (hell, even the dialect is the same as mine) and doesn't insist on going through the same tedious "tick" sheet every time you call, and they *do* get things sorted when problems occur.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    It's a question of bottlenecks..

    If the line conditions are good enough, then the next bottleneck along is the ISP. You could easily see much lower speeds with Tiscali..

    I'm on ADSL 2+, BT's own estimates say that my line should do 11 meg. With a fairly noise-tolerant DG834 router, and clean wiring in the premises, I can screw the signal to noise ratio pretty hard, giving me a reliable 17.something meg connection, which reliably manages a comfortable 1.7 megabytes/sec download (via Demon).

    So far so good. However, I did have to do a little bit of arsing about, for this speed, originally, I was getting about 9 megs from this connection.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    o2

    Was always giving out the estimated figure before ofcom rules on giving the estimate rather than the package headline speed, granted i work for them so your milage may differ.

    And it is truley unlimted usage. and yes a lot of problems are caused by really shitty internal wiring or jusy plain wrong setups in the home unfiltered inputs/cheap wiring and some really screwed intial BT installs.

    Lots of things outside of ISPs control can really screw up the connection or the BT line length database having really out of date info in it.

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  4. The Avangelist
    Thumb Down

    why is this suddenly news?

    We have known this for the best part of a decade. The infrastructure is not in place within the UK to cope with data travelling down copper other than phone communications.

    That is the whole point of the 21CN network install which is due to finish 2012 (cite req). Until we have fibre optic door to door (never gonna happen) we wont get decent download speeds because we are all sharing lines to the boxes and boxes to the exchange.

    I live 262yrds from exchange exactly, I have never got a decent connection regardless of provider. What is in the ground is toilet, and there's nothing we can do with that.

    The only thing that will result from any mass-debate will be that providers will have to change their advertising regulation to not specify 'speeds up to' anywhere on their marketing materials. Complete waste of a conversation.

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  5. The Avangelist

    oh and I forgot to mention

    It don't mean diddly what you have going in and out of your house because you have no idea what is on the end of the cable to the server you are trying to connect to, whether it is a media service, website, torrent whatever, if they have only got a 512k upstream you aren't going to be getting any faster are you.

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  6. I didn't do IT.
    Happy

    Business class

    Does the UK have anything analogous to a business class service? Or is such a service disallowed to a "home" address?

    I am paying roughly £40 for 20Mb up, 5Mb down (admittedly in the US). Isn't there something similar for UK? I had similar "home" class service (both pricing and speeds) and it blew. Since I utilized this "silent upgrade", my service has not been throttled, and I am averaging 2.3 Mb/s. Serving business and personal website have no issues even when viewing HD movies and TV online.

    Frankly, I am more than happy to pay the "extra" for the excellent customer service (12 hour turnaround onsite tech, helpful and courteous help desk, and non-agressive billing support call center), all without any indication of traffic shaping or "fair" usage limits. And it's cable (gasp!).

    Surely, if yanks can get this in the "country", brits can too? Or is this something they don't like to bandy about?

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  7. MinionZero
    FAIL

    Sadly, we have much further to fall...

    As Virgin can manage higher average speeds compared to other ISPs, then that proves the excuse of distance from ISP is often a lie. Other ISPs can do better but they would sooner lie to customers rather than increase their data rates. Yet Ofcom and the Government sit back and do nothing to stop them lying. Meanwhile the UK is falling ever more behind other countries. What a surprise.

    Any new business that relies on high bandwidth will be at a serious disadvantage in the UK. Other countries must be loving the opportunity being handed to them by the UK corruption, greed and incompetence.

    As for the jaw droopingly pathetic UK government target of 2Mbits by 2012, it looks like we have much further to fall.

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    The groweth evermore?

    Financiers

    Bankers

    Accountants

    MPs

    Members of the Lords

    Civil Servants

    Ofcom

    .

    .

    .

    ISPs

    Are we predicting a pattern here? (SPSS not needed)

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  9. Rab Sssss
    Flame

    @MinionZero

    carves "cable and ADSL are not the same" on cluebat.

    Stop embarssing yourself you numbnuts...

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  10. Steve Evans

    Local loop...

    I don't need to do the speed test to check my speed. Any download I do gets 2Mbs and no more, and that is because that's as fast as my modem will sync to the exchange.

    I'm on the outskirts of the M25 in Essex. I spent several years at 1Mbs because I couldn't get upgraded. Changed ISP and got to the current dizzying heights. My signal to noise is not going to let me get any more.

    I have run my own high quality twisted pair from the BT box on the front wall. It goes into an active filter that splits the ADSL from the rest of the phone sockets under the stairs with my router and a CAT5 feeding onto my LAN.

    Different routers have made very little difference, although I must say my current £25 ZyXel P-660R is probably the most stable.

    I can do no more to take advantage of my "up to 8meg" package. Just sit and use a maximum of 25% of it. Although I'm sure if I do that I'd get capped!

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  11. Peter Kay

    @'As virgin can manage higher average speeds'

    You do realise Virgin are a cable company, using coax to the home, instead of ADSL/ADSL2+ over a copper wire pair? The two technologies are not comparable..

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Hello, subscriber!

    We were wondering if you'd like to upgrade your broadband package from "lots" to "oodles and oodles"?

    Why should I? You can't actually even supply "lots". How about you upgrade from "what I'm getting" to "what I'm paying for"?

    <click>

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  13. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Unlimited @ whatever speed

    nuff said

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  14. MTB

    Download speeds

    You suggest that rural download speeds are on average 3.3Mb/s; here in South Herefordshire I would be happy with 0.3Mb/s! BT claim that my service is capable of 1Mb/s but I never achieve better than 120Kb/s for a true download.

    Why should we pay the same tariff for such an inferior service? If the infrastructure cannot supply, we should pay pro rata.

    I have spent hours in fruitless discussions with the BT technicians on the Indian sub-continent, and have, for several weeks, been waiting for a response from the BT "UK Assist" team, to no avail.

    I find it interesting that other ISPs can supply a better service. Down BTs lines? How do they do it?

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  15. Another Anonymous Coward 1

    @MTB

    You sure you aren't mistaking bits and bytes there?

    A 1 Mbit line would generally result in 120 kb/s download, it's another annoying thing about ISP advertising, the exaggeration of speed by using bits when the majority of people only understand megabytes, gigabytes etc. Divide by 8 to convert the headline speeds into what you'll see in the download bar.

    Would be better if Ofcom forced the ISPs to measure speed in kilobytes or megabytes per second.

    Posted from a 20mbs virgin line... I get the full speed, and don't have a problem with capping, the process is transparent and listed on their website in a table.

    After 9pm there's no throttling, so it's fine as far as leaving big downloads overnight goes.

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