UK broadband speeds still snail paced

I live less than 30 feet from the main BT exchange in the city where I am based. I enquired about the new 20 Mbps service on the BT website and have been informed the most I can expect is 12 Mbps.

You can't get much nearer to the exchange than me, a BT engineer confirmed the cable goes from my house into one of those street corner boxes then straight from there into the exchange, it doesn't take some fancy route around the town before returning.

If I can't get 12 Mbps this near to the hub then I am pretty sure nobody else can in the city where I live - Coventry.

The way BT operates is a joke from my experience... My router syncs at the full speed my IP profile says 7000K on the bt tester site yet I'll be in luck to get a 2Mbit connection regardless of the time of day or night. If they haven't got the infrastructure to support people at the speeds they say you should get then they shouldn't advertise it as such... I beleive the majority of peoples speed issues are them cramming to many people on to the same connection rather than invest in new hardware to keep up with consumer demand!

I can only get a 1Mb/sec ADSL connection, I am quite a distance from the exchange and I have no other options to receive broadband (no cable, exchange is not unbundled).
I understand exactly why I can only get this slow connection and when I signed up to my current "up to" 8Mb/sec package I was under no illusion that I would get anything faster, but why the hell is my glacial broadband still subject to download limits and traffic shaping?

Hahaha..I feel bad for ya folks across the pond. I'm on a 12Mbps line and get the speed that's advertised.

Do NOT take away our right to label the bandwidth with GB, mb, MB, Mb, mbps, kbps, Kbps, Gpbs, etc.. It would be a disaster if the ISPs had to use an accurate, international standard. Seriously, the British Broadband industry would suffer heavy losses if people could sue them for false advertisement. Today, and ISP can sell 1000 MBS connexions, and nobody can do a damn thing about it, because in court they just tell the customer that MBS stands for Mega BullShit. Everything else would be Un-British, and Un-American, too. To hell with the SI.

How many connections do you have on this exchange?

What the bandwidth between the exchange and the ISP?

If the ISP's only have e.g. 1000mb connections to the exchanges. There is no wonder when it it could be shared between a few thousand homes.

Having worked for 2 technical support for 2 diffrent companies i can say 90% of the time the slow speed is down to the end user, estimated speed via post code through the BT wholesale checker or sam knows gives a near 100% match to what you "should" get. All the problems are down to either, fualt with one of the filters in the setup or lack of filtered devices on the line genrating noise which brings down speed. 2 the router/modem, the BT face plate, even my brother has an issue with his face plate with no extension sockets in the house which brought his speed down from 5mbps to 1.5mps through the test socket. Or the use of extension socket or cables as any extensions which reduce speed and increase latency and in most case genrate slight noise on the line. From the test socket to an extension socket on average 1.0mbps. Face is i have spoke in 1000's of customers and most of them can be fixed. The only time anything gets done is if the end user can be bothered to even do the tests. The problem next being is you have to check or sync speed as the BRAS profile will not increase for at least 48 hours. So they test it does not have an effect right away and say you are useless, even through their sync speeds have increased from 256kbps to 6500kbps and if remaining in the socket will get 6mbps in 2 days. So as it is they are capable of giving you the speed quoted but issues are with customers internal setup and wiring. This is not to say that there are no fualts relating to speed, however they will show and BT whole will normaily fix the fualt in about 12 hours on average.

I also had my ISP (Sky) check out my line before I signed up, they quoted me 0.5Mb against their advertised "up to 16Mbps". I live in Milton Keynes (don't remind me about the aluminium!) and I'm 3km from the exchange. If this is the Max that I will get from 3kms, then God forbid, what about those living beyond such distances? Luckily, for me, Sky have a reasonable package that goes for £5pm. Anything more than this would be a rip off!

I've been saying this for the last 3 years. i have been through 4 broadband company's just to find one who wont choke my connection.

BT are the worst for it. You ask them for the estimated speed they give you something like 3meg as your 'too far from the exchange' then deliver 1.5 meg variable. that's not what i or anyone in my area was paid for. 1000000 arguments to over seas tec support that just end up telling you 'well that's how it is' just made me move to sky who gave me a connection of 5meg (stable) on thwe line bt said it was impossible on.

Some of these company's give you less bandwidth on purpose cause it saves them money, end of. Offcom should break out the fines which they can pay with the money they ripped off us.

having suffered nearly 5 years of poor service from bt broad band, I feel that until bt are subject to hefty fines as other utilities(gas electric & water suppliers) are then they will continue to sit back and take your hard earned money. so you are paying for a service you are not getting.Since May 2008 i/ve spoken to no fewer than 22 people in delhi in an effort to keep my brooad band on line,this is in my opinion a delaying tactic to cover up the poor service of bt.this also takes up your time waiting for these very polite people to try and sort out your problem. and this will continue until such times that fines are introduced, this will then make bt sit up and take notice.

Openreach now runs the backbone that provides the core UK bandwidth, the backbone is inadequate and not fit for purpose. BT's excuse about distance is disgraceful, if distance really is the issue then they can fibre to local street cabinets and provide adsl from them. Let's not mention that Taiwan manages to provide 100 Mbs mobile broadband, or that UK broadband is more akin to fast dialup or that if you do use your bandwidth "fair-use" policy is used to restrict your bandwidth. OFCOM is NAFFCOM, as it proves once again that the least important factor in the UK are the people that live here!

Companies (and maybe government) in UK should start with fiber already. Considering the small size of the island, it could very well be the next South Koreea or Japan.

They could just add a couple of pounds to the monthly fee and get their money back in about 5-10 years. Maybe sooner if they'll be smart and offer extra features like telephony, video over ip, pay per view channels and so on.

We have here UPC and RDS in Romania, both are cable companies, but they both decided it made more sense to bring fiber close to subscriber's houses.

RDS brings fiber inside the apartment building and a switch and inside each person's home there's regular UTP cable, and for about 15-20 dollars a months, you can get up to 100mbps in the town you're in and some select towns in the county (metropolitan network), about 20-40 mbps depending on the plan you're on everywhere.
They also use two of the 8 wires inside the UTP cable for digital telephony.

UPC just brings fiber to 2-3 apartment buildings, and then somehow injects the signal into the regular tv cable, and each person gets a regular cable modem in the house.

I pay on UPC about 20 dollars for 20mbps down , 2 mbps up. 20mbps are real, anytime, anywhere in the country, outside the country is almost all the time 10-12mbps.

Honestly,we wouldn't even imagine ourselves using phone lines and ADSL to connect to Internet.

I'd rather go with 3G wireless modem before. Even this costs about 8$ a month, and offers 3.6mbps down, 176kbps,with a certain monthly GB limit (large enough but obviously not for downloading movies).

So? What's your point?

The continual obfuscation and political lobbying of BT over the past few years has ensured that the UK is at the bottom of the connectivity league. OFCOM and the DTI knew, yet were powerless and unwilling to grasp the turkey's neck and produce a workable competition strategy that would incorporate the available technologies into a UK wide internet. The fledgeling companies that were the driving force in the early days were killed off one by one; mine was one!
We had the technology to offer speeds up to 72Mbps max, with averages of 54Mbps, over distances of 12Km point to multi-point an speeds of 300Mbps point to point. Funding from national and international sources was not forthcoming due to the UK's political uncertainty and greed for license money.

I would like to think the 8Mb advertised speeds are correct - if you live on top of the exchange. So since most ADSL customers are not in that happy position, I laud Ofcom for this rapping on the ISPs' knuckles.

Fibre optic is the future as previous posters have said - however laying new infrastructure costs money. Given that most Internet providers are already operating on fairly low margins, I don't think most providers are really making enough to justify putting lots of money into investing in a new network, especially if there is no indication that customers would be willing to pay more and receive a faster service. Plus there is the fact that the banks won't really be lending enough to make this possible. That leaves the Government to build the infrastructure, which would probably require taxes to be raised even higher than they already are.

I think many will be watching how Be's 48Mbps and Virgin's 50Mbps services fare in the current economic climate. I do see some people biting, but not a lot.

And Streamyx Customer: That's what you get with what is practically a monopoly provider, and it's not that cheap either. Malaysia deserves better. My own experience with Streamyx says it's not that bad, though. Faster than dial-up, but I think a basic 3G connection in KL or other urban areas will give it a run for its money.

Why oh why are BT still using copper cables? I have always detested the idea of ADSL - it should only have ever been an interim solution. Fibre optic is the future - I cannot believe some people posting on here can actually defend ADSL and the crappy speeds we get in this country. Oh an if we are to start getting increased connection speed the record industry needs to come out of the 90s and realise that people now have large music collections and are not prepared to pay 79p / tune on legal download sites.

Despite Mr. Système International's pedantry, it makes no difference if I chose to express my download speed in nibbles per fortnight, I am still being ripped off, I think.

I get from 220 kbps to over 1000 kbps from my connection provided by Tiscali. The big variation in speed seems to depend how many of Tiscali customers are online at the same time. The poor speed is due in my case to limited bandwidth and has nothing to do with the distance from the exchange or the use of copper wires.

I agree about the article, because I pay £18.50 a month for my broadband with TalkTalk, and I only get most 220kb download speed, which is very annoying. I think the ISPs should do something about it otherwise their going to lose customers.

This is ridiculous. Almost any ADSL ISP gives you an estimated speed before signing up, taken from you distance to the exchange. It is the old fashioned BT copper lines that cause the slow speed. In my opinion fibre optic is the way forward.
I have been on NTL/Virgin cable for at least five years and have always had very close to advertised speed (a speed test now indicates 9.88Mb from an advertised 10Mb)I have almost never had any downtime I can remember and have never had to call them.
Emerging and younger countries have better speeds purely because they have more modern phone-line infrastructure.
And as far as I'm aware BT are implementing fiber optic i.e. 21CN.

James Cross's comment [10.01.09] about paying for the speed you receive is the only sensible way forward, I 100% agree with him.

The answer is simple, you should pay what you get for, e.g. if its £8/week for 8Mb and you only get 3.5, then you only pay £3.50 - simple. This then would encourage the providers to get the highest speed possible to the customer. As it stands now, they have no incentive at all.

Look: if you think you've a raw deal, you should try Malaysia's dominant provider Streamyx, part of the Government's TelCo TM (for Telekom Malaysia.

With a 1.5Mb SDSL connection running on fibre, within Malaysia it works brilliantly. But who wants to visit Malaysian websites? Answer- almost no one. So the internet is really for international traffic. Streamyx says it is not responsible for international speeds and so the fact that we get speeds of 3kbps (and yes, that is NOT a misprint) with both email and browsing timing out so often as to be useless is just tough.

And you are complaining in the UK that your system works at 2Mb - and actually delivers that?

Sure, the providers overstate their deliverables - but 1.5Mb down to 3kb and page turning often running into minutes not even seconds - you're nowhere near hell so stop bleating.

I had BT check out my line before I signed up, they quoted me 0.5Mb against their advertised "up to 8Mbps". Right from the horses mouth a downright lie.

So I bought a 3G dongle from "3", they said I was in a high signal strength area and quoted 3.6Mbps. What I get is 500-700Kbps!!

Did OFCOM check the 3G guys as well?

Customers like Peter Byles get what they deserve for their ignorance. There is a simple reason why we have an international standard for units (SI).

k - kilo, 1000
M - mega, 1000000
G - giga, 1000000000
B - byte
bit - bit
s - second

kB/s - kilobytes per second
kbit/s - kilobits per second
MB/s - megabytes per second
Mbit/s - megabits per second
etc.

I am positively surprised to see that Emma Hughes got it right. Hopefully not just a matter of copying the OFCOM report. Perhaps OFCOM could help consumers by fixing the telcos' ads? Surely something can be done to help Peter Byles.

I live in a small village in Northamptonshire about 2 1/2 miles from an exchange. My BT broadband (so-called) download speed never exceeds 460 Kbits/sec (yes, under 0.5 Mb/sec) even in the middle of the night. But I still have to pay for a so-called 6Mb/sec connection. Can nothing be done?

Rather than a 'Slap on the Wrist' why doesnt OFCOM grow some and fine these companies for false advertising? And why dont they bring in legislation which means a company can only advertise a speed of a broadband product if it runs at that speed 90% of the time for 90% of its customers?

"UK surfers are receiving a broadband speed of 3.6Mbit/s when the average maximum speed which most lines are capable of is 4.3Mbit/s" - Therefore these companies should only be allowed to advertise the speed of their product as 4MB not 'upto 8MB' or 'upto 16MB' but 4MB, as this is in fact what it is!

But NOOOOOO, that would be too simple for OFCOM, it would make too much sense, it would be actually doing what they are supposed to do and REGULATE - the lazy morons would much rather sit on their big backsides and drink tea!!!!

"Tests were undertaken over a 30-day period with around 1,500 homes running 7,000 tests through monitoring units connected to the broadband connectors"

Broadband connectors?

What's that then?

I wonder how accurate these 'tests' are. I mean a lot of people I know on ADSL use wireless. If they have a box attached to their router it can't monitor the true speed as it's shared with the computers connecting in wirelessly. Now if they were say routing through these boxes I could see how exactly it monitors the speed. I had this problem with Vonage, I had the router connected to the Vonage box and had to route all my network traffic through the Vonage box's gateway for the QoS to work correctly otherwise the phone quality was somewhat awful.

I could however understand how these boxes could work on Virgin, sat between the cable modem and the probable router which is usually plugged into the modem.

Maybe it is about time that Ofcom actually did something though. Yeah sure LLU is available in SOME exchanges but it seems that the providers are just picking and choosing who they enable which really doesn't help.

Rob

There needs to be more options for connectivity. I live in east London, and cable simply isn't available here. The phone line is crappy enough, and I'm almost perfectly in the middle of a triangle of exchanges, so 4.5MBit is the best I get.

It's a far cry from my previous address in west London (Ealing), where I was getting closer to 18Mbit.

I'd be willing to pay up to 100 GBP / month as long as I got at least in excess of 10Mbit again.

Simply because of the service many people I know receive from Virgin/NTL, its shoddy and you can't migrate to another provider on cable because their are none. On ADSL get the Mac (Just shout at them until they give it to you) and get another ISP to do it for you.
Its a shame though that technology has not been implemented for ADSL2, although I still doubt I'll get over 8mb with it.

(BTW with a BT I-plate got an extra 512k)

You Don't Have To Ping ALL Way to China, pick local address to ping test. People expect too much of other end & especially mid week day or special draw events, speeds decrease. often person just dosn't care, if it takes 20 seconds to load one page, Your very slow, if it takes 2 secs, your Warmin Up in Sun.If it changes so fast You cann't even see page change, Your toasted. Just adding more bandwidth is expensive & often Not Worth it, 3 Mb/s is enough for single outlet. Seldom would home need more, yet wed eve & kids are home, diversify your connects, have both cable & wireless, that way if RF gives you heart attack, kids can go back to cable only or even FAST dsl.Nose Bleeds DON'T Count. Drashek M.D.

A lot of service providers use ADSL which comes over in some cases 40 odd year old copper designed for voice calling, so its not surprising a lot of users have trouble reaching the top speed. The cable providers using fibre in the ground layed back in the 80's and 90's do get very good speeds over further distance :)