Another broadband story appeared yesterday about the ongoing poor performance of broadband speed delivery in the UK by Internet Service providers (ISP’s).
According to the BBC news article, Which Magazine carried out a survey of some 300 UK broadband users and found that…
The average speed achieved in the Which? trials was 2.7Mbps, with the lowest coming in at under 0.09Mbps, barely at dial-up rates, and the maximum only reaching 6.7Mbps.
It’s very clear from this report and conversations that I have had with various users that there is a vast difference in broadband download speeds across the country.
I am sure that the BBC article will receive a high number of comments from users, but I am surprised that some of these have not already appeared on the BBC Have your Say page.
Another point that the article discusses is the overselling of potential speeds that users can expect as part of their contract. For example its pretty much accepted that unless you live in or right next to your local telephone exchange, no one is going to get 8MB download speeds.
Of course, it is possible to purchase dedicated (and expensive) lines that will give you 8MB (and above) speeds, but this post is relates to the general consumer products sold by the likes of BT, TalkTalk, Orange, Tiscali and others as can be found in listings such as these [1], [2], & [3].
But back to the overselling of speed, it seems strange to me that ISP’s can still get away with implying that their product is one thing; when, in fact it clearly is not. Just about the selling of every other product seems to be highly regulated in the UK, why not Broadband Speed. The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) seems to be pretty limp with it’s approach to monitoring and even Ofcom (who are supposed to be the regulator) seem somewhat uninterested in sorting out the situation.
Looking back at the Which Survey figures – I was not one of those surveyed and I don’t subscribe to their publication, I wonder how those surveyed measured their Broadband speed. After having some speed issues last May (the related support issues could fill ten more posts, maybe they will!) – I’ve been a broadband user for some years I decided to monitor my download speed on a more regular basis. Partly for my own interested and partly to feed back this info to BT who are my ISP – how uninterested they were, I soon found out. – Another post perhaps.
There seems to be quite a number of non-ISP tools available in the Internet for testing broadband download speed, not all of them work well, but the once I’d spent some time searching and testing, I use these three, One Stop Click, Audit My PC & tcp/IQ.
By using the first two tools and working out an average, I’ve produced a set of graphs since I started monitoring my broadband speed.
Some background info, I’m served from the Reading South Exchange which is approximately 1.5 miles/2.5 km.
May 2007 Averages: Download – 4.066 MB, Upload – 384.2 KB
June 2007 Averages: Download – 3.436MB, Upload – 359.7 KB
July 2007 Averages: Download – 3.380MB, Upload – 355.3 KB
So far August has thrown up some small issues, not helped by poor support, but the speed seems to be building up again.
Do you have speed graphs that you can share? I’m sure that everyone would be interested.
More on the state of support in a later post.
Beasley's Place 