back to article Ofcom urged to clamp down on broadband speed deceit

The Ofcom Consumer Panel has called on regulators to pull their fingers out and demand that ISPs are more honest with us about the limitations of broadband. The group wants a new mandatory code of practice to force providers to qualify their dodgy "up to" speed claims, which accompany virtually all broadband marketing. The …

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  1. Mark

    "wallet usage policy"

    Like it.

    I also have yet to write my EULA for my cash. I mean, just because I give them money doesn't mean they can do ANYTHING with it.

    And if they don't like the agreement, they can give it back (less a 10% restocking fee)...

  2. A J Stiles

    Honesty gets you nowhere

    It's all a numbers game. Punters will choose what they perceive as the best value connection. ISPs have cottoned onto this. Being faceless corporations, they have only one responsibility: make as much money as possible for the shareholders, and don't care who gets hurt in the process.

    So they sell services that they haven't really got. The only way you can ever get your full 8Mb/sec is if nobody else with whom you are contending is online at the same time. And they know that is unrealistic, so they have to impose caps on total downloads as well.

    It's no different, conceptually, from the banks lending out more money than they have silver to back it up with. There simply is no incentive to play fair. If you advertise your broadband service honestly, someone else can advertise a worse service *dis*honestly and still look, to the uneducated, as though theirs is better. All it's about is catching customers by showing them big bandwidth figures and small prices.

    The simple truth is that people in this country will pay any amount for stupid luxuries -- advertisements suggest the more you piss up the wall, the more people like you -- but they absolutely begrudge paying for necessities.

  3. Matthew

    Stop with the whinging!

    All of this 'I only get 16 MB' is really annoying to those of us who live away from a city. The *best possible* speed I can get is 1 MB; my neighbours get 300 kbps...

    The solution is simple: take an average of all customers' speeds and quote that in the advertising. This would provide a huge incentive to upgrade links, maybe deploy fibre to the door...

  4. Alexis Marett

    just wait until BT brings in there new network

    As we speak BT are currently upgrading their network to a true IP based technology, when this comes in I bet we will a real improvement to the connections we get to the internet,

    Just remember that ADSL is a new technology running on old an old system

  5. Neil Barnes Silver badge
    Flame

    Funny, I'm sure I keep reading about miles of dark fibre...

    Time they used some of it... I'm happy to pay for what I'm offered but I'm blowed if I can see why I can't get that. Imagine the scenarios:

    - My car can do 'up to' 70mph on the M1, but if I drive more than 40 miles I'm limited to 35mph...

    - I can speak 'up to' three words a second on the phone, but if I talk for more than ten minutes I get every second word removed...

    - I can get 'up to' five litres a minute from my tap, but if I fill a bucket, I can only have a dribble for the next hour...

    We wouldn't stand for it in any other industry. It's not a question of resource management; it's a question of truth in advertising...

    Neil

  6. Stu_The_Jock
    Happy

    UP to speeds.

    Well this is the problem in the UK.

    Over here in Norway (1 yr here now after fleeing the UK) we're on a meagre "up to 1.5mb" line, and hell every time I test it I get between 1.4 and 1.5 (depends what the wife's doing on the lappy downstairs at the time)

    This line goes shortly when they install the new fibre networjk they're installing in most semi major town, MINIMUM service is 10Mb/10Mb and tallking to people that already have it, they get 8-10 both ways almost all the time, as it's fibre from INSIDE the house to inside the local server building.

    Sure the 50/25 line was tempting, but a bit expensive . . . wife said no to that

  7. Robert Bolt
    Flame

    Broadband - why not pay for what you get !!!!

    Why do we pay for what we could get (if we live in the telephone exchange). OFCOM should say we must only pay for the service (speed) we receive.

    Why should I, receiving a speed of 1Mbits because of my distance to the exchange, pay the same as someone receiving 8?

    Where is the encouragement for them to improve our service?

    If they were paid only for the speed we receive, they would soon find ways to boost service to those, who like me, receive a very poor deal from them!

    Time to start a revolution.

    Let's all complain to Ofcom about this, see what we can change!

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Cable fill & technical limitations

    The problem is that people don't understand or care about the technical limitation of offering DSL services in this country. From all these nay sayers, I have not heard of one better option of the 'upto' marketing pitch.

    Bear in mind...the effects of cable fill (remember these are unshielded cables) - as more DSL customers come into your cable binder the DSL sync speeds reduce - by as much as 50%! - ISP's and indeed Openreach have no idea of the route your copper pair takes to the exchange, so this could go round the houses, over Aluminium for part of the way. All in all, it's Impossible to say with any certainty what speed a customer will acheive - and also impossible to gurantee they will be acheiving that speed in 6 months time.

  9. AJ
    IT Angle

    @ Alexis Marett

    This is no justification to the false advertising all ISPs are doing, Whether the BT network is being upgraded or not (which isnt done over night its going to take a good few years) customers should get what is advertised its that simple!

    And I agree that companies should offer service guarantees, its only right. If they cant guarantee a speed of service they should not advertise it as that speed, they should advertise it at the LOWEST it would run most of the time.

    So if its 'up to' 8MB but over 75% of the time you would only get 3MB then it should be advertised as a 3MB service!!!

    It really is THAT SIMPLE!

  10. Nick Funnell
    Thumb Up

    Ripped off

    The 2 reasons I left my previous ISP were because I never got the advertised rate - the most I ever got was 6.5MB on the top package - and the cost of the package. Add the constant disconnections and throttling, and I was not a happy bunny.

    I am now with another ISP who advertised 'up to 16MB' - and I get a constant rate between 14 & 15 MB. Can't complain with that. They even contacted me after a couple of weeks to confirm that I was on the correct package. And I was given 100 days to cancel with no penalty. With this ISP, if you sign up to the middle package (16MB) and you only get 5MB say, they downgrade you to the lower package. A great idea, and thats what sold it to me. I am satisfied with what I now get.

    Every ISP should follow this procedure - without fail. But normally by the connection has 'settled', it's too late to get out of the contract. It needs to be put right.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Up to 8Mb - why it all went wrong...

    hello rizla

    Mr Naismith points out a few ways part of this mess could be improved, the prime one being that ISP websites can currently make whatever outrageous claims they like and no one will do anything about it.

    BTwholesale's "capacity based charging" (CBC) was where things started to go wrong. That's when BTwholesale's pricing policy changed from "line rental increases with line sync speed" and "interconnect to ISP = not too outrageous" to "line rental independent of line sync speed, interconnect = outrageous". The new pricing regime was chosen to be BT revenue-neutral at average usage of 20-50kbit/s. Ofcom approved this change, despite objections from clued-up ISPs like Zen who said it would destroy the quality of the broadband market.

    ISPs then had to start seriously considering how best to pay for their overpriced interconnect to BT (this was at a time when Ofcom''s description of LLU as "widely available" meant six exchanges in London and one elsewhere). Pack more people in was the obvious conclusion for most ISPs. Impose caps etc was another option. Admitting that "unlimited" had gone forever wasn't on most ISP's agendas but the costing arithmetic made it inevitable that "unlimited" was now a lie.

    Then the big boys started seeing that maybe LLU might actually be practical after all (LLU is too expensive for smaller ISPs to play on a national basis). So a few years later, we've got half the country's exchanges with LLU, with each big boy having functionally duplicated BTw's expensive broadband infrastructure, all of which needs to be paid for. Meanwhile in order to attract punters to pay for it, the big boys are offering "free" deals which aren't, and contracts are getting longer and longer. Across the market, LLU or not, headline prices are going lower and lower, and so is QoS in every sense of the word, because "free broadband" is very hard to compete with. It's also a lie, but Ofcom do nothing about it.

    Meanwhile BT says "wtf are we going to do about LLU?". The regulatory regime is so daft that at one point BT Retail's head man, Pierre Danon, was talking about going LLU just to get BTwholesale's costs off his balance sheet. He found a new job shortly after that. Outside BT, obviously.

    That still left BT with the problem of what to do about LLU competition, without spending any money. One thing they could do *relatively* easily was upgrade the line speeds between exchange and punter. There's no capital cost for that, just some changes to the relevant business and operational systems. It might leave the already-struggling "virtual pipes" from exchanges looking even Redder in the face than they traditionally were, but the ISPs can always be blamed for performance issues and no one will be any the wiser because no one's allowed to watch BTw closely enough, for "commercial confidentiality" reasons.

    So, upgrade punters lines across the board to "up to 8Mbit" if they want, call it "ADSL Max" to make it sound good, but don't spend any money to significantly upgrade the backhaul to match, just hope that increased revenue from ISPs paying for more interconnect bandwidth will eventually pay for extra backhaul.

    If marketed *honestly* this could still have been attractive: "your 2Mb broadband can now go even faster when there's spare capacity" - but there has to be spare capacity *all the way* between punter and ISP to see any benefit. And the interconnect between ISP and BT is now so expensive that for most ISPs except the most expensive there's no spare capacity to speak of, definitely not at times when people actually want to use t'Internerd, and several ISPS (led by Plusnet) start deploying at "traffic management" kit which prioritises "interactive" stuff (browsing) and selectively discards "low priority" stuff. By coincidence, by this time, Plusnet's head of broadband was Neil Armstrong who had previously been at BTw, where he'd architected capacity based charging. And not too long after that, Plusnet were taken over. By BT. Small world, eh.

    All of which, strangely enough, happens with the full knowledge and apparent cooperation of Ofcom, and indeed under the watchful eye of El Reg (and also AdslGuide, which covered much of this on frontpage news articles and forum discussions which were ignored elsewhere). I wonder why Ofcom have changed their tune now?

  12. kain preacher

    US

    Well I guess i'm lucky that here in the states the local telco wants to compete with the cable companies. They are laying FTB. What they are also doing is re working there infrastructure. They are replacing lots of cable with fiber.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The truly simple answer

    Just ban all ISPs from offering any services over 1Mbit/s until such time as all subscribers are able to achieve 1Mbit/s reliably. Then advance to 2Mbit/s, etc. That might, just, persuade people to fund BT to put some decent cables in the ground, and provide connections to non-metropolitan areas.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    x-Mbit Bandwidth for £30/month? IMPOSSIBLE

    If it wasn't for Up To and the contented/shared nature of consumer broadband, there would be no service of any kind for anywhere close to 15-30quid/month.

    Would you like, a real guaranteed 2Mb Internet service that will never slow down at peak hours? You don't mind paying a fair market price for a quality service?

    ITS YOURS FOR A £10,000 CONNECTION CHARGE AND £1,000/MONTH RENTAL. ISH/BALLPARK.

    In many ways it is quite remarkable that DSL brought anythingMbit/s into the home at the price point it does. But of course you can't go from £1,000 to £30 and make a commercially viable service without compromise. Specifically a variable line speed, and ISP networks that over-subscribe bandwidth many times over.

    Also note that the £15-30quid a month for your ADSL today is the same price you were paying for 512k when ADSL launched in the UK. We then got 2Mb, and

    many punters got upgraded to this for free. After this came free upgrades to 8Mb. The consumer is being ripped off here how?

    £20 for 512k .... or £20 for Up to 8Mb?

    2Mb was always the practical ceiling for ADSL to get what was advertised. After this, things get very hit and miss. The 8Mb is a hard technological limit for ADSL(1), but 2Mb -> 8Mb is a huge grey area. Up front speed prediction is impossible, for what you pay, and how it is delivered into your home.

    As wise posters here have already said, new regulation would just move us back to the lower speeds of yesteryear. BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.

    UP TO 8MB is a perfectly clear, fair and accurate definition for a service that will simply try to give you the best you can for the price you pay.

  15. Lee Sexton

    Yet again....

    The real issue of shunting as many customers onto pipes and using "traffic shaping" is swept under the carpet, to me this is the real issue. This computer active campaign annoyed the hell out of me because I felt my petition addressed this issue more than speeds of up to did for adsl as you can quite easily find out what speed you are likely to get with bt broadband checker which is usually linked from the isp you are buying from. Another smoke screen. Throttling is the real problem and oversubscribing!!!

    http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/broadbandripoff/

    please sign this one, still waiting for a response from the minister!!!

  16. Mark

    Ofcom's in a tight spot then

    Must've caught Ed Richards on the hop. Looks like Ofcom have been put in a bit of tight spot here by their own 'tame' consumers. They're going to have to put in a bit of graft to earn their crust and put a lid on this nonsense, get back to the comfy old status quo; consumer expectations of the industry at the usual low levels, and ISPs treating their customers as little more than an irritant after they've signed on the virtual dotted line.

  17. richard
    Unhappy

    ISP strangle hold

    I agree we should be better informed about braudband speeds, but as a kingston communication (karoo) customer i arnt sure what i can do if i arnt happy with the service and they know that. For those of you who arnt awere that Hull and surounding villages are beholden to KC as it is a private phone network, nothing to do with BT so we can only use (Karoo) supplied by KC, and when you ring up to complain you can nearly see them smiling waiting for you to say "well i arnt happy with your service" to which they say "well sir you can leave" knowing full well if you do you wont be using the internet again. I am on the 0.5Mb package costing £16.99 per month and it is running at an average 65Kb / sec which i was told by the tech help desk is about right as i must divide what i think i am paying the earth for by 8 (dont know why and neither did he). If i were to upgrade to 8Mb it would be £29.99 per month. So think youself lucky cos your probably paying much less than me but even at your reduced download rate still getting much faster braudband.

  18. Mark
    IT Angle

    Complain and ye shall receive

    I currently 'enjoy' an average 3,000 kbps and 6,300 kbps on the 8,000 service from BT, but it took some doing and a lot of bloody minded determination to get here. Previously I was getting as little as 98 Kbps at busy times with an maximum of 5,000kbps - hell of a range wouldn't you say!

    Yes, I had to spend hours on the phone to some overseas help desk explaining what a contention ratio was, explained why it wasn't my neighbours toaster causing interference and a hundred other reasons. Finally, I got some action and magically the system improved.

    Before anyone does complain, you must check your end first and this includes the wiring and equipments. For anyone interested, here is a quick checklist:

    1. Check all sockets for correct wiring - my house (new in 2000) had every socket wired wrong.

    2. Connect your equipment to the main socket.

    3. Fit filters to every extension - don't forget that Sky box.

    4. Make sure your router is correctly configured and is suitable for the service you wish to use.

    5. Check out the DSLZone dot Net for some very useful tips and tools.

    Enjoy

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    When 8 Mbps is actually 7 Mbps max anyway

    With BT's network 8 Mbps is the max speed of the line, not the IP throughput anyway. In reality it's almost impossible to get more than a 7 Mbps IP profile.

    As for the advertised speeds, BT told me I would get a maximum of 2 Mbps on my line when I am, in fact, synchronised at 6.8 Mbps with a 6 Mbps IP profile. It's not 8 Mbps but it's more than what the line check said. So the advertising is broken in both directions.

    Note: This is in no way a recommendation of BT's service or customer support. Quite the reverse in fact. The incompetence of their "support" is staggering. The problem's always with your PC, never with the line - especially when it blatantly is with the line. In the meantime, please be happy with a 135 Kbps profile since BT

    retail don't know how to make a call to BT wholesale to get a profile reset. So is that an "up to 135 Kbps" service then? And since you won't get more than 2Mbps on your line, we're not getting off our chairs to reset your profile if it's more than 2 Mbps already because our systems are always right and you, the stupid customer, are always wrong. Service and customer satisfaction the BT way...

  20. michael
    Thumb Up

    a hosest isp

    http://www.keconnect.co.uk/products/residential/broadband/

    unlimited meaning unlimited and big wanrning aboiut the likley speeds on max services and relistic speeds on over ones

    and you pay for it they are expencive

    but I would still chouse them over bt

  21. Eponymous Cowherd
    Flame

    Re: x-Mbit Bandwidth for £30/month? IMPOSSIBLE

    ***"UP TO 8MB is a perfectly clear, fair and accurate definition for a service that will simply try to give you the best you can for the price you pay."***

    No, it doesn't. Absolutely not. 'Up to 8MB' implies your actual speed will be something approaching this speed, particularly if you were sold an 'up to 8MB' service as an 'upgrade' to a 2MB service.

    The 'up to' refers to, and is advertised as, meaning the peak speed on the local loop will be 'up to 8MB'. Customers are led to believe that the speed their line test indicates will be the speed they will achieve. Looking at BT's 'Total Broadband' sales site, nowhere can I find in the Ts&Cs, service description or line checker any mention that the speed you will actually attain will depend on anything other than your local-loop line quality. Nowhere can I find any mention made of network congestion, contention ratios or traffic shaping.

    This is false advertising, pure and simple.

    ( I now expect some anally retentive twerp to plough through BT's Ts&Cs and actually find the info. Even so, the fact remains that, even if they *do* exist, references to low download speeds are much too deeply buried for something so fundamental to the service being advertised)

  22. wabbit02

    Transparancy - not SLA's

    Broadband speed depends on so many different factors not just length of cable or distance from the exchange (or contention). BT's line checker tool actually does a pretty good job of estimating speeds - what should be mandated by ofcom is the use of this tool and report back to the end consumer at time of purchase the range that their line is capable of (as well as some other points below).

    I have recently moved house - after broadband was installed, I ripped out the dodgy line extensions that the previous owner had installed, net result 500k increase in sync speed. Are BT/ the ISP responsible for this?

    The issue from the ISPs perspective is that you have ADSL, SDSL, ADSL2+ and cable carriers (ok these are the main ones). Most people don't understand the difference so how do they sell it to the public? UPTO is a well understood and recognized format (brand if you like) - but again I believe the ISPs should be forced to be more transparent.

    In regard to people stating about congestion/ contention - it has been stated on this thread already but, for a 2MB line from BT with an SLA, your looking at around £7000 pa + installation costs (depending on the local infrastructure) + ISP costs, so you wouldn't get much change for £20,000 in the first year. Thats what it COSTS. If thats what you want then THE PRODUCT IS ALREADY AVAILABLE - go sign up.

    Most consumers are price orientated again IMHO there should be mandated transparency at time of purchace (and if there are any significant changes), to include expected line range and peak contention via the ISPs peering (e.g. how many people are competing for how much Internet connectivity). This would be a start, although POPs and regional variations would slightly skew this - but its a start. Then at least consumers would be able to compare apples to apples.

    There was also a comment about 21 CN - I have posted about this before. It will do nothing to improve Internet access or last mile connectivity in its self. What it provides is cost savings and a more flexible platform (read more capability to bill you). It may in fact make "service" worse in the short term while they are "optimizing it"

  23. Seán
    Coat

    Looky thar

    Aren't the civil service efficient, when dealing with the civil service.

    The simple solution is to get yourself connected to "the engineer", the guy who's actually plugging in the leads and flipping the switches. Offer him a bottle of whiskey (Irish not that scotch muck) or some folding cash, if he can jigger some speed out of your line. Bam, problem solved.

  24. Steve

    Simple solution

    Replace 4MB, 8MB and 20MB with Pear, Banana and Orange. People have no idea what it means anyway and just need a reference with which to compare packages. Then, you give each ISP a rating for how close their average speed is to the 4MB, 8MB etc theoretical limit.

    Consumers do not get to issue a project spec and then wait for tenders, they simply need a system to easily compare what the different ISPs have to offer.

    I know full well that "Up to 8MB" is not going to give me 8MB 24/7, but I know that the ISP's are all using it to mean the same thing so I can look at their relative prices and make a choice. What will really make a difference is a standardised logo system for representing download caps and penalties for exceeding said cap.

  25. Neil Jones

    Whilst we're at it...

    Several posters have used car/road analogies in these comments, let me offer this:

    A private road builder builds a new motorway (think M6 toll). It’s a motorway, so they say you can do up to 70mph on it. But during rush hour the traffic builds up so maybe you’ll average 60mph, maybe you’ll only manage 30mph. Or you would, except your car is several decades old and not very well maintained, so it can only manage 20mph.

    Isn’t it still reasonable to say that the motorway is capable of providing speeds of up to 70mph?

    There’s a few good, intelligent and objective comments on here, but they’re lost in the rest of the irrelevant and unreasonable dross. I always seem to find that the ones who shout about “knowing their (consumer) rights” are the ones who know them least. Have you actually read your ISP’s T&Cs? You don’t sign up to an advert, you sign up to the contract T&Cs as anyone with even the most basic grasp of consumer law will tell you.

    Yes, there is perhaps an issue that the theoretical maximums quoted by ISPs are only that, and maybe adverts could make this clearer. But what about those evil manufacturers of Cat5e cable, routers and switches with their claims of 100 Mbit/s and those pesky USB and Firewire products with their claims of impossible transfer rates...

    Surely theoretical limits are an established fact of life in the IT world?

  26. Stuart Halliday
    Thumb Up

    Virgin media speed

    For 6 months with Virgin Media I got with my 20Mb/s connection a terrible 7-8Mb/s.

    Seemingly they needed to upgrade their neighbourhood cabinets and eventually gave me a new cable modem. During this time I got given a discounted back-dated. Though I had to ask for it!

    Fault was low S/N ratio at the higher speeds due to 'old equipment'.

    Now I get 12-13Mb/s during the day (that's taking a 1MB file off their own servers).

    With an advertised 20Mb/s I should be getting a real-world of 15Mb/s (75%) from within their own network I would have thought. So I'm pretty close.

    Tip: When phoning their 50p pay-by-min technical support and it's their fault, demand a refund on the call if they don't offer it. You're entitled to it.

    I'm constantly amazed how my IT day job has been steadingly leaking into my home life over the last few years...

  27. Philip Percival

    ISP - Line speed

    Interesting to read the comments about ISP honest with regard to line speed. I feel this pales into insignificance with what I have been told by three ISPs, with regard to Broadband Max and Up to 8 Mb. When I have complained about speed I have been told that BT will not investigate anything where the customer is getting above 512K as that is the acceptable level as far as BT is concerned.

    Regards

    Philip

  28. fred base
    Unhappy

    OFCOM - day late, dollar short

    As usual.

    Aren't these the people who were supposed to break BT's monopoly? 18 years ago?!?

    I still have no alternative to using BT where I live. Even subscribing to another phone provider still requires me to pay BT's monthly standing charge.

    OFCOM - as much use as the ASA. Chocolate teapots the lot of them.

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