Most Brits get half the broadband speed they pay for

BRITAIN IS officially party to the great broadband speed rip-off. According to research by moneysupermarket.com, 44 per cent of Brits are getting half the speed they pay for.

In order to attract customers, the likes of Sky are offering speeds of 'up to 16 Mbit/s'. The survey found that a mere six per cent actually get anything near that.

This INQ hack has just switched from Bulldog to Talktalk from the Carphone Warehouse. The results actually confirm one obvious finding from the survey.

That is, the slower the rating the better chance you have of getting what you pay for. There's two ways of finding out your broadband's actual rating.

One is from Thinkbroadband here and the other from ZDnet here.

The Bulldog line was rated at 0.5 Mbit/s and was spot on. See here. By comparison, the Talktalk line was just under 3 Mbit/s see here.

The Zdnet test put the figure slightly higher at 2.9 Mbit/s. But it is still less than half the 8 Mbit/s which is promised.

Typical get-out clauses include the distance the subscriber is from the telephone exchange. In our case, the exchange is visible from the back bedroom window. You can't get much closer.

More worrying is that according to one avid INQ reader, BT has been deliberately throttling back its offering.

"I have two ADSL lines on different phone lines one is BT, the other is Virgin.net both are 8 Mbit/s lines and have been working happily at about 7.5 Mbit/s for months if not years," he claimed.

But apparently after a change to BT's software, his lines fell initially to around 0.4 Mbit/s. After a lot of complaining, it's gone back up to 0.9 Mbit/s.

A document on BT Yahoo's page appears to confirm that changes to speed rating are afoot. Some of the advice for increasing your throughput speeds is completely off-the-wall. See here.

If this situation continues, there's going to be even more complaints to the advertising standards authority but will anything actually get done about it?. µ