Survey on broadband speed 'is out of date'

Jul 30 2009 By Karen Dent, The Journal

A REPORT claiming that no broadband customers are receiving the top download speeds advertised by ISPs has been branded "out of date" and "unreliable" by BT.

It was reacting to research by communications watchdog Ofcom, which said that it was impossible for anyone to receive the advertised ‘headline’ speed of eight megabits per second (Mbps) because some capacity is reserved for technical reasons. Ofcom said the fastest speed recorded was 7.2 Mbps, which was only possible for users living very close to the telephone exchange,

Although half of the UK’s broadband users have packages advertised as ‘up to 8 Mbps’, in practice the average speed received was 3.9 Mbps and one in five received less than 2 Mbps - the minimum target speed set in the Government’s Digital Britain report for all UK homes by 2012.

But BT, which is responsible for the wiring, fibres and connections linking customers to their ISPs’ networks through its Openreach wing, said the watchdog’s report was already out of date.

A spokesman said: "BT Retail has already started to move its customers onto more advanced broadband which offers a far more reliably fast service at peak times.

"BT has ambitious plans for fibre broadband which will be rolled out to many parts of the UK next year and which will deliver speeds way in excess of what Virgin offers most of its customers today.

"BT would urge people to treat the figures with caution as they are not consistent with much larger independent surveys that constantly monitor speeds and so we feel the data is unreliable."

Broadband supplied through the standard copper wire - known as a DSL connection - is significantly slower than those on cable broadband.

Customers on Virgin Media’s ‘up to 10 Mbps’ cable service received speeds more than twice as high as ‘up to 8 Mbps’ DSL customers. However, the Virgin Media service is not available everywhere.

Neil Stephenson, the chief executive of Middlesbrough technology company Onyx, said he was not surprised by Ofcom’s findings.

"The amount of people being sold ‘up to’ a certain speed - that’s really just good marketing," he said.

"The level of speed is really important - it’s not just about speed, it’s about what you can do with it. More and more of our business customers are making use of applications like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), video conferencing or working from home.

"There is an issue still of the availability of fast broadband. Lots of people in our area live in rural areas and they are restricted.

"The bottom line is, the faster the connection you can get, the more you can do."

Mr Stephenson, whose company recently expanded into Scotland, said faster speeds will become more crucial in future to deliver software and applications to computers. But he says most people do not know what download speed they are receiving.

"The top slice of people who are very internet savvy do but there’s a massive chunk in the middle who really don’t know," he said.

Ofcom’s six-month study involved more than 60 million broadband performance tests in 1,600 homes, and found the average broadband speed in the UK in April was 4.1 Mbps, up from 3.6 Mbps in January.