News UK ISPs under fire for false advertising

Admittedly I was messing around in WMP11 at the same time, but bah.

On topic though, although the ISPs advertise high speed packages, there's always a disclaimer stating that the speed depends on line quality etc. So if anyone's going to get criticised, surely it should be whoever's in charge of the line the data travels through, ISP bashing seems mostly pointless unless haggling is involved.

 

I'm getting just under 7meg on my 8meg connection from Sky (non LLU) but I do live just a hop, skip and jump from the exchange

 

usually my speeds are very good with orange (formerly wanadoo (formerly freeserve)) I live about 750m from the exchange as the crow flies but recently its been rather poor. I think our exchange is located near to the metrolink lines and I think they've probably cut a cable or something. Bloody workmen!

 

I can honestly say vm is shite I know 4 people who live 7-8 miles away from each other that all get 500kbps -1meg connection from 4-12pm although all are on 4meg or above connections and all but 1 doesn't download much. If you want to complain they all say it's upto 4 meg (or whatever connection you are on), even on they own network. Richard Branston has sold his brand down the river by given his name to the NTL monkeys.

 

YaY for Hull

OMG i seem to hav a twin. i was here first, lol.

Like the member said before, Im from the land that the internet forgot too, namely Hull. We have no choice of provider whatsoever, we have to use Karoo (Kingston Communications).
All they offer are 4 levels of the new so called 'Max' service its the most inappropriate name ever.
The theory is the higher the level you're on (i.e. the more you pay the higher priority you get, and hence faster speeds).
Well im on priority 4 (the highest), costs about £30 a month.
Dont think i've EVER got above 450 KB/s download, its throttled to high heaven, you can only get full speed (if you can call it that) during off peak (midnight - 7am).
During peak times you literally get oldschool 0.5Mb speeds if your lucky.

What i'd do for a bloody choice of ISP.


just to inform the other 'hullian':

I have a bit of experience in this area, technically its not a monopoly. In most of the country BT own the lines, they then in turn rent them out / let other companies use them for a fee, which is what happens when someone wants broadband/telephone from another provider. In Hull, however, the lines are all owned by KC, whilst companies can rent their lines no-one wants to because its not worth it, KC put the prices so high its unprofitable to do so, while technically not a monopoly, devious tactics nonetheless.

Its better than it was, up until under a year ago we just had 512, 1m, 2m, 3m. The only decent speed, the 3 meg service was ~£40. Anyways thats all you lot filled in on hull.

 

First ISP which decides to not cripple my connection down to what it was in 2002 during the evenings gets my money.
I've just checked my line attenuation thing and I'm hitting the limits download speed... just shy of 4Mbits/sec. But I have 22dB of space left in my upload speed so I should be able to have 1.5Mbit/sec up... which would be nice!

Crippling people's connections is the main problem as far as I'm concerned. I fully understand the limits of the line. But to down to 512K for the main time of day I actually use the internet is utterly ridiculous and thievery. Before upgrading to "maxdsl" I used to be able to have a completely, 100% stable speed of 2Mbit/sec 24-7. I live in a village of old people. There isn't some massive load increase on the switch gear in the local exchange. They limit it because ISP's don't want to spend money on actually dealing with the traffic properly doing the requisite constant upgrades... so they stop the customers from using the services they pay for to save cash.

 

im with BT, i get 4234kb/s down and 382 up

still pricey imo, since i have to pay line retal on the phone like, and i dont even have a phone.

 

we get some nasty deals over here in the US too.

verizon FiOS may be fast but its throttled and even blocks some traffic completely (bittorrent)


I'm with Comcast and get 9638 kbps down, 2365 kbps up

 

mate, I had that same problem. Just call them, demand to be put throught to their disconnections team. Explain to them that you were mis-sold. If they wont do anything tell them you will have to report it to trading standards and OFCOM. It took me an hour or so to do it but they eventually gave me my MAC.

 

Everyone go with Tesco! We have 512kb broadband, and we actually get that, even though we live miles from the exchange
its not the fastest ever, though it is what it is advertised.

unfortunately at school we have been sharing a 10meg line between about 2000ppl, it really crawls

 

Is anyone with sky for broadband? Just been on the phone with them, I’m thinking of signing up for there 16MB package, which only £10 ontop of sky TV. Little bit concerned now how fast it will actually be?

 

Ive not heard any thing good about sky broadband to be honest.

Sam

 

I did actually just copy the information stright from the router config (Netgear), It wasnt made up.

Here is more information:
ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 896 kbps 448 kbps
Line Attenuation 63.5 db 31.5 db
Noise Margin 9.7 db 13.0 db

To me that is all garble as i dont understand any of it other than the connection speed.

Sam

 

Well as people right next to the exchange don't even get 8Mbit Internet, isn't it a bit odd to advertise it "up to 8mb"

Anyway with BT's competence I'm surprised any of us have broadband at all

I'm on an "Up to 8mb" plan and people have estimated i would get 4mb, but i get about 2mb max, when BT aren't throttling the connection that is (because, ofc they cant actually supply everyone with the speed they pay for because they are too cheap to put in the infrastructure)

I can understand the "up to 8mb" line though, its hard to send out an ad to people who could live 1 meter from the exchange, or 10 miles from the exchange
However, when you phone up to decide, they can give you an estimate on your actual possible line speed

 

To be honest samkiller42, that's as fast as you're going to get at the moment with a line attenuation as high as that. Above 60db, you're basically looking at 512kbps, so the fact you get that is pretty damn impressive. All I can suggest is to make sure that your router is plugged into your master socket, that you have good adsl filters, and that's about all you can do.

With figures like that, the max that line will give you is 965kbps, and that probably wouldn't be stable either.

 

Ah it's kind of predicatable they run this fast, the phone system in the UK is so old anyway...

though I would just like to point out that my download speed is 56352 kb/s.

That's right.


In all respects. OWNED

 

You can take what I say with a pinch of salt if you like, I work for Sky.

I have a good connection with them, just under 7meg on the 8meg package, since November I have had one downtime of a couple of hours.
P2P traffic is heavily shaped/throttled, but if you are using bit-torrent, encryption solves that.
All I can say is that from my experience they have been good, although cust service is not an issue for me (internal email)

The thing with Sky, is the same with any ISP it all depends on your line attenuation i.e. internal wiring and distance from the exchange.

If I were to recommend anyone else it would be Nildram, I was with them before Sky and they were as close to perfect as I have experienced.

 

So who is your ISP then?

 

sticker for you but thats only 7044kBs..... Wait 7meg of the web is great, how'd you get that!?

 

I was thinking of moving from VM, with all the little things they've been doing since ditching blueyonder they have started to urk me. However reading the article and the posts here i think i'll stay put for now, at least i'm getting what i'm paying for.