End all the 'up to' broadband speed bull. Release proper data – LGA ISPs should release data on broadband speeds at a household level so residents can easily compare speeds and switch providers, the representative body for 370 local councils has said. The Local Government Association (LGA) is calling for greater transparency of speeds direct to consumers' homes rather than just their postcodes …
> "Up to speeds" should be the expected peak time speeds for 67% of users
*ahem*bullshit*ahem*
"Up to" speeds should _soley_ refer to line sync speeds and should show typical speeds, not the maximum available speed (My car can go up to 140mph. I've never been that fast in it and in central London I'd be hard pressed to go 30mph)
ISPs should be forced to disclose multiplexing ratios in each area and overall. They can control what speeds are attainable up to the border of their network but everything beyond that point is not under their control.
What is a multiplexing ratio? How would consumers be able to interpret that? How would you even define it? It's fiendishly difficult to do this meaningfully.
Let's take it to mean sum on sync rates divided by sum of external network connectivity, counting things such as CDN as external connectivity.
Assume an operator has 10:1 "multiplexing" ratio in this meaning and they offer a 100Mbps service today. Let's say they decide to upgrade that to 200Mbps. Then that suddenly becomes 20:1. Does that mean the network has become worse for the customers?
On the other hand you can have 10:1 which a couple of years ago may have provided a completely uncongested service and today it's slow due as average consumption went up.
There are much more meaningful metrics such as off-peak vs. peak transfer speed. That is actually measured by Ofcom today.
Actually most ISPs today score very well on that.
More than that, it's really the best the providers can give because this is literally a case of "Your Mileage May Vary". Internet connections are like a chain: they're only as good as the weakest link, and many times the weak link isn't the ISP but somewhere else along the way. How can ISPs properly account for this?
How can ISPs properly account for this?
That is not their job. If I use a bus to get to the train station to take the Eurostar, do I blame British Rail for the slow bus? NO.
However, if the Eurostar somehow only achieves 33MPH all the way to Paris, and they blame it on London Transport, I would expect "questions to be asked".
"It's just taking advantage of the general population's stupidity."
Downvotes ahoy, but I really feel like I ought to say something about brexit here...
...thing is, MOST advertising takes advantage of people's stupidity and/or lack of attention. This is absolutely the best shampoo on the market (sample size of eleven bored housewives). Nine out of ten cats prefer it (I bet the alternative was a Tesco stripey tin cat food - and we must surely feel for the cat that preferred it). FullHD, just don't ask what the actual screen resolution is. And those loan adverts that finish with the Ts&Cs in rapid blurry text and spoken so fast you'd have to concentrate to catch even half of it.
Advertising is the art of taking something mundane and sexing it up into something desirable. Oh, look, now I feel like I ought to say something about apples...eeee, look at my big bramley.
"Up to" is okay, just not very useful. It tells you what you might get, possibly could get, but no indication of how likely you are to get it.
"From" isn't very useful either, because that's going to have to come with a cart load of caveats because sometimes things do just go slower and it's not always the fault of the ISP.
Some sort of average seems better but still isn't a guarantee of anything, nor an indication of what others may get.
The problem isn't so much what claims say but what they mean.
Maybe. But if you give "up to" for my postal code, which covers the edge of a large city and extends out into the countryside, only the urban part can get the "up to" speed even if they pay a premium for it. The rural folks don't have the infrastructure going to their homes to carry the "up to" amount no matter what they are willing or able to pay. Anything above street level is misleading, because the equipment can vary widely within an area the size of a postcode.
Interesting site - I'd been wondering when someone would come up with something like that. Interestingly their testing methodology is run with an HTTP Post file transfer, which would run over TCP, which has a warm up time, so may well under represent what you might possibly be able to get with a UDP connection (admittedly with the possibility of errors).
It would be nice if house move websites allowed for an actual test result to be included in the sales brochure, rather than linking to the BT checker which abuses the "up to" terminology
I don't trust this data at all.
The fundamental problem with the data is that it doesn't actually give you the service being used. So in my area for example, the speeds are very interesting, either people are getting sub 1Mbps or a variety of numbers which indicate people have subscribed to various FTTC packages. So is has neighbour with the 42.5Mbps service, actually paid for an up to 100Mbps service...
Obviously, I've caused problems because the dataset includes my mobile broadband connection which uses a roof aerial to improve performance - with the arrival of FTTC, the anomaly of this service isn't quite so striking...
"Internet connections are like a chain: they're only as good as the weakest link, and many times the weak link isn't the ISP"
In most cases, the weakest link is the connection to the property. In the UK the majority of broadband users only have the option of using the copper wire to their house, so the speed will be entirely dependant on whether FTTC has been rolled out to their area, otherwise they are on basic ADSL where distance to the exchange is the main factor.
The BT Wholesale speed checker can pretty much tell you exactly what's available if you put in the phone number corresponding to the broadband account in the "Further Diagnostics" page.
So maybe just getting BT Wholesale to supply a database of highest/average/lowest speeds by postcode will be good enough for most? Virgin and other cable suppliers could probably provide similar data for their connections.
"In most cases, the weakest link is the connection to the property."
Depends. If you're connecting around the world, there's plenty of potential for a weak link along the way. If your destination's pretty obscure, you raise the chance for a weak link. There's a lot of factors beyond your control, though I will admit if you're at the mercy of a DSL link in the middle of nowhere, you've got a pretty lousy hand to start with. I wouldn't know; I've had cable modem since about 1998 and wired my own house. With FTTH as the local alternative, the cableco's been steadily improving the service and are now starting to roll out Gigabit service (via DOCSIS 3.1) to counter. I don't trust the max speed, but the data cap that goes with it looks tempting.
What the LGA or the media don't really mention quite often is that a lot of the speed / performance issues are due to the poor state on phone wiring beyond the master socket in the home. The BT Wholesale speed checker site is generally a pretty accurate estimate as long as there aren't wiring issues in the home and anyone can use this site or use their ISP provided version of this info when signing up.
People will often complain about poor speeds without doing even the most basic of diagnostics on their own home setup and blame the ISP or Openreach when the responsibility for any wiring issues after the master socket is the householders problem.
As an example, I recently went to resolve an issue for someone where they had upgraded to FTTC (via BT as ISP) and the estimate for their line was 40mbps download but they were getting about 15mbps. I found this was entirely due to their extension wiring being spliced in before the master socket. As soon as the extension wiring was correctly wired into the removable panel on the front of the socket and a central VDSL filter fitted then the speed went to the full 40mbps.
I found this was entirely due to their extension wiring being _illegally_ spliced in before the master socket.
There, FTFY - and in such cases Openreach are fully justified in charging full whack in remediating the problem caused by interfering with the line on their side of the demarcation point (There are a still a couple of offences on the books which cover this kind of thing)
"Virgin and other cable suppliers could probably provide similar data for their connections."
They could but there isn't much point IMHO. From my experience and that of others I know who are Virgin customers, if you're in a Virgin area you pretty much get the advertised speed.
This comes down to the the type of cable used and the fact it is much newer and was always intended to provide more than just a basic audio telephony service unlike a lot of BT's copper, maybe not the 220Mbps it's now doing but still more fit for purpose than a single twisted pair phone line.
Occasionally with Virgin post install visits are required to fit attenuators or they have to tweak the power levels from their end but of the dozen people I know on Virgin in different areas, they all get the speed advertised.
Virgin's only real speed problem is contention in some heavily populated areas.
"From my experience and that of others I know who are Virgin customers, if you're in a Virgin area you pretty much get the advertised speed."
For a long time around here, people were getting the advertised sync rate but throughputs during peak evening period would have made a 33k6 modem look spritely.
Virgin have(had?) two speed problems:
Contention - this used to be awful, haven't been with them for a while now, but it was a serious problem. I wasn't in a large city either...
Upload speed - I used to saturate my upload trivially, IIRC it was <10% of my download rate. That's extraordinarily poor. And with the vast increase in 'sharing' and 'using someone else's computer' this is more and more important.
The download was great - their customer service when presented with logs indicating a failed coax in the street cabinet was appalling. The failure manifested between 9:30 and 10 at night until 6:30-7 in the morning (temperature related) and they consistently sent engineers out at midday - who said there wasn't a problem.
Eventually I got an actual network engineer and we looked at the houses with issues, and decided where the fault had to be. We were right - and it took 5 minutes to fix it.
local data for local people
Given that the LGA represent the bureaucrats that decided my festering rubbish only needed to be collected every two weeks, have shut down half the libraries, can't maintain roads, are slashing the social care and community health provision (to spend the money on other shit, like in my local council's case, a music festival) I'd suggest that the LGA stick to talking about things they know about.
It won't be a very long list.
I particularly like hair colouring products. "Covers up to 100% of your grey". Well.. obviously.. I mean even if you missed your head completely whilst applying it, the statement would still stand.
Most people who tried it, loved it and would buy it and recommend it to a friend and they'd recommend it to their friends it's that awesome!" And in the small print it says according to a survey of 11 people. There just isn't small print small enough to make that kind of claim and keep a straight face.
What I very cynically want to think happens there is they decide they want to say a particular percentage - so as soon as the numbers hit that percentage, they stop, lest it starts to go down if they carry on.
What probably really happens, though, is hardly anybody can be arsed to fill in the survey, so they're stuck with stupidly low numbers - and despite the fact that makes them meaningless, they use them anyway, hoping nobody will notice.
I wouldn't mind terribly if these claims can be controlled by the law in some way. Like testimonials can ONLY display typical (let's say modal to avoid wiggling) results. I will admit that "up to" claims will be hard to control since for some firms that's all they can promise (due to lack of control). But a law that demands as much truth in advertising and as little wiggle room as possible would be nice. But as they say, the devil is in the details.
"As has been mentioned previously, the BT Openreach estimator that's available to wholesale suppliers is pretty accurate."
The speed I'm able to get in the middle of the afternoon here might be a good deal more than what I'd get in the evening if a lot of people down the road start streaming stuff when they get home from work and my bits have to share the infrastructure with whole lot of others. It might also be better or worse than my neighbours; all our connections come from the same point on the buried cable. Mine comes underground, theirs are overhead from a cable running up a pole, some of them distributed direct from that pole and others from a second pole linked to the first. Clearly there are various options for water penetration, different wiring choices (Al vs Cu) etc.
The laws of physics are irrelevant.
Customers should only pay for the service they receive - not what the supplier might THINK they are receiving. And it's high time someone made that mandatory.
If only OFCOM actually worked for the consumer instead of big business.
Dave promised to scrap them....oh well, just another one of his broken promises.
Well, the "up to" is just garbage. I mean, I can sell an "up to 100Mb" to You, and deliver just 2Mb. It is "up to". Not good enough.
To me, the reasonable course is advertise a "no less than". Sure, go ahead an print the "up to", i don't care. How about "up to 100Mb, and no less than 10Mb"? It is fair, allows the ISP to sell what it wants to sell, and informs the consumer.
Here in Brazil, the law says the ISP have to deliver at least 80% of the sold speed, during no less than x% of the time (forgot how much, I think it's 60% of the time). It's another way to do this.
But I think the "no less than" is better. You can sell how little "no less than" You want, but cannot go bellow it.
If people want to complain, they should be required to submit a speed test at the time of the supposed problem as evidence that it was the ISP at fault.
Simples.
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