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Does your broadband operate at anything close to the speed stated by your ISP? According to a new report, as many as three quarters of households in the UK are faced with internet download rates that are slower than the one advertised by their provider for their particular package. Worse yet, almost none of those affected are qualified to leave their contracts early as part of new OfCom legislation.
Areas that suffer the most under the current regime are those in rural and less built up areas, where as many as 98 per cent of households did not receive the advertised broadband speed. Often, due to their location, they even paid more for the privilege too. However things aren't much better, with just 31 per cent of homes receiving the promised download rate.
This is the best I can do around here. There's fibre everywhere but at my local exchange. Go figure.
Despite that though, only around two million people would be able to switch provider and cancel their contract, according to the Which? data (via the Telegraph). The reason they are able to leave early, is because not only does their broadband speed not reach the heady heights of the “up to X” advertised speed, but because their download rate is lower than the average lowest 10 per cent of households on that package.
That is just one of several rates that broadband providers must quote customers when they sign up to a package. What is the advertised speed, what their likely speed is and what their minimum guaranteed speed is. It's only if it falls below that latter mark, that customers are legally allowed to switch before the end of their contract.
Richard Lloyd, executive director of Which?, said: “It's not good enough that millions of homes are so poorly served by their broadband provider with speeds that just don't live up to what was advertised.”
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KitGuru Says: If you have a particularly low download rate and want to shop around to see what is more competitive, find out from your ISP what your “guaranteed minimum,” speed is. If your download rate is less than that, you may just be able to change provider. OR at least bully your current one in to making some upgrades.
I have 1 Gigabit connection. Always.
I signed up to EE (upgraded, really) Fibre. “up to 76Mbps”. They told me my line would get about 74Mbps. They took ages to install it, but when they did, sure enough I got 74-76Mbps… for a month. Then it’s dropped down to ~44-48Mbps.
As you can imagine I’m kicking off about this. I suspect it’s either:-
1) There’s a fault in their equipment in the cabinet/exchange
2) Crosstalk
3) They’re intentionally lowering the speed
They’ve got engineers supposedly working on this.
Either way, I’m not getting what I was told I would get, so I will be looking for a reduction on my bill if they can’t get be back to 74Mbps. The line is capable of it.
Well at least the ISPs here in Greece are honest, they say that it may or it may not reach the 24mbps up and 1mpbs down, well I lock on 16mpbs which is not bad but with the current ISP I lock at 0.8 mbps upload and this is a pain for my cloud backups.
what do you expect from EE? Their phone service is terrible so common sense would say that their “broadband” is just as crap, dont know why you considered them in the first place
Google Fibre is the next upgrade for all
Because I was already with them for ADSL (which was 2Mbps, no matter the provider due to my distance from the exchange) and when I called for a MAC code to move to another provider, they offered me a cheaper deal to stay. Their line rental saver was cheaper than anyone else and now it works out at £16pm for my conneciton (we don’t use the landline at all. It is unplugged).
Their line has always been good, and despite this slow down, it’s still fast. They’ve got BT onto the case, but I’m highly suspicious they’ve intentionally dropped the connection.
yea, rds ftw .
You think so, my ISP is Wind and my connection is under 1 mbps. If you are on OTE then it is guaranteed that you will have 16 mbps.
Hello everyone there is a question can I ask for an upgrade to fibre or some other package that will give me higher speed for free? if the advert was 15mbps but I am getting less than 1.5mbps
Well in the end it just depend on where you live, in my parent’s house I just changed hol to wind and I get 15/1mbps and it is pretty stable. (my ISP is hol)
I will never again return to OTE, but if you live in a remote place OTE is the only option.
We had 6 mbps internet and our IPS acknowledged it but it still charged for the promised 50 mbps.
You will never get minimum speeds quoted by your ISP when we have BT maintaining the network, no accountability to hold them to when things go wrong…
The J0bSite on the Net @mk2
..
http://www.FinanceNetMoneyleep/tap/tab….
+1 🙂
I live in Ano Liosia and this is a remote place as you said and I’m way to far from the server. My first ISP was hol and I had a pretty fast connection(approximately 3-4 mbps).
Also some friends of mine that they also live in the same area as me they have OTE and they get up to 5-8 mbps.
That’s just unlucky for some. I live so close to the Virgin FTTP exchange, on the 150mbps package and manage to pull an awesome 190mbps speeds. Once you’re with Virgin fibre, you never go back.
Me too 😀
When i look in the network settings on my pc it says “Speed 1Gbits” 😀
Joke and noob to site. i have 80/40 Mbits and is more then ok for myself 🙂
Well what do you expect …. there are only TWO Broadband Providers in the UK …. Virgin Media and BT ….. BT use ADSL and claim it is fibre-optic broadband, it’s not. Virgin Media actually use Fibre-optics.
EVERY other provider (Sky, Talk-talk, EE etc….) LEASE their broadband off BT, that is why you will never get your so-called “Promised” speed it will always be “Upto XX Mb/s)
I currently have BT’s Infinty 2 packagewith promised Upto 75Mb/s connection, Since I moved house I have been lucky to reach 35Mb/s, they (BT) have said there is nothing wrong with my line and that I am receiving thge maximum speed for my package.
BT gave me a link to site that explained why I was possibly getting such low speeds, looks like they gave you the same link, talking about Crossover and Rain, which is just gobble-de-gook for “The more people connected to the box, the lower the speed you receive”
As you know, the more people in your household that connect to the net (via laptop, iPad, mobile phone, xbox, PC … etc) the slower your connection will get.
It is exactly the same with the Junction Box at the end of your street
Every house on your street that is connected, AND EVERY connection in that house, will have an effect on your speed
Plusnet, with line rental saver, 16mb broadband, and the money back deal, comes to around £12.50pm. £16 is pretty standard to be honest, it’s not a great deal. If you’re paying that much for standard broadband then go with Sky or something and get them to bundle in a TV package for free. We were with them a few years ago for standard broadband and got free Sky+ HD (paying around £13.50 pm inc. line rental). This year we’re with them again for fibre, with 40mb/s down and 12 mb/s up (which we always get – it’s never dropped below 37.5 down and 10 up); we get Sky+ HD, and a phone with a bunch of free calls, all for £24pm including line rental.
We don’t have TV and such, so Sky is no use (Plus it’s Rupert Murdoch – no thanks).
I’m supposed to be on the 76/20 package, but I’m only getting about 48/20. If they can’t sort it out I’m going to moan and ask for a reduction on the bill, to move to to the 38/10 package, or I’ll find an LLU provider with their own hardware in the exchanges.
500 Mbps…didn’t waste extra cash on the 1Gbps since it’s not worth unless you keep a free clean maintained SSD.Anyway before praising Rds-Rcs let’s not forget that we didn’t have an infrastructure which made it easier to build it from ground up than changing existing infrastructure(costs are higher) as UK has to do
Isn’t there a consumer protection system so people can complain and sue companies for paying the price the full price but not getting the full speed?
Learn something before you post BT is the only ISP with true 100% fibre buts that’s only to less then 1% of homes both BT and VM have fibre/copper hybrids fibre up to a point at your local cabinet then copper the rest of the way
VM just have better quality cables coax cable that’s shielded versus old in shield copper on bts network
1 Think I need to point out to you on this on Kitguru, If you are using a BT line with any ISP, moving to Virgin will usually fix issues. Moving from 1 ISP to another… not so much. Alot of people that leave one ISP because of speed issues will usually get them with another ISP unless it is the equipment in the exchange at fault or the router. (The line between the 2 remains the same)
It should be mentioned that IF you change ISP, don’t give the new ISP shit if the problems persists… its like your car driving like shit so you change where you buy the petrol. However, the cars still shit and you need to get your car fixed!
Poor sloppy journalism. The report is useless and completely incorrect too, Which? seem to have confused connection speeds with throughput speeds which are extremely variable due to end users internal setups (wireless etc) and not the responsibility of the ISP.
Virgin don’t have an exchange as such just a central hub, and distance from this hub is irrelevant as its fibre from the hub to your local cabinet and copper from the cabinet to you. Also, Virgin also sets a hard limit for throughput in the superhub config file, which if your on a 152mb line, I think is set at 160, so you may potentially have a burst speed of 190, but the average speed will be 152mb or less
My speeds are supposed to be 75/75… as you can see, I don’t always get that. I was told to expect traffic around me to have some draw on my bandwidth. It’s a deceiving sales ploy. They know they can’t guarantee it but they wont spell it out to you until you have the service.
http://i.imgur.com/rXQEXIt.png
Check on the BT website to see if your area is enabled for fibre. If not then there isn’t a lot you can do unfortunately apart from registering your interest in fibre in your area. It isn’t much to do with the ISP and the speeds you get as they can only estimate what speeds you could get, it’s the equipment that gets used (your router, the length of the line from your house to the cabinet, the cabinet itself) that makes your internet slower.
With Virgin I’m supposed to get 152/12 I actually get round about 160/10. Not really complaining, but could do with the 10 being 100.
Just as an update I also have BT at home supplied by my company, I work from home, the best I have ever seen out of that is 4.5Mb. I use my own connection for work as well.
As someone else has posted once with Virgin you won’t go back.
Yup 150/30 mbps from Bell Fibreop!!!!
i pay for 18 down and get 0.3 🙁 BT are bastards
BT Infinity 2 here in the East Midlands, 67Meg download and 19Meg upload. Good enough for most things.
meh still better than this crappy dsl ive only got 5mb
Sky, standard…..
Somehow my internet connection is 2MB/s faster than what our ISP quoted.
My package is 120MB/s 😛