News ASA rules to ban 'up to' broadband speed claims

Nice to see pro-consumer choices are still made occasionally.

 

How on earth is the ASA going to know that the claimed median download speeds are accurate, It's a good idea but how's it going to be enforced?

 

Through Ofcom's existing testing regime, presumably. This is hardly difficult data to gather.

 

A testing regime that sees them draw conclusions from often less than 3k people.

 

Seems like a nice idea in theory, but without breaking it down by exchange and speed tier, it will be useless. I get 60/11 off peak and wouldn't really care if that dropped by half during peak hours (not that it does), but that information doesn't do sh|t for that poor sucker who can only sync at 6/0.5 and shares an OC-3 backhaul with 100 other homes.

What I will say though, is that the UK really needs to scrap their single tier broadband offerings, where you pay the same regardless of if you sync at 1mbit or 24; that's total horse sh|t.

 

ADSL has been uncapped to 24mb for long time now, yes it be nice to have it cheaper if you're only getting 1mb

main issue is with VDSL it should just be one product for it (80/20, or a ADSL like priced 20/2 lower price for long line) and Not be called fiber broadband (as its isn't) unless its actual fiber (FTTP) then its a profile sold based product (there is no up to with FTTP its 40, 80, 160, 320 or well somthing along them lines) same with virgin as well its profile based not distant based

virgin problem is more complicated as Local street level FTTN nodes in some places (less than 2-3% which is still a lot) been overutilized and virgin not bothering to do anything about it until the next version of DOCSIS comes out that has more capacity (in this case 3.1 is currently been rolled out but you need a VM superhub 3)

same thing happened on our street about 3 years ago half of our street went back to 1-4mb ADSL (no VDSL at the time) as it was useable,, as VM was dropping packets due to local node upstream overloaded, Virgin Needs to enable QOS to prioritize packet quality and latency over speed as its no good having 100-220mb when its missing 2-50% packets makes websites half work and streaming and gaming near impossible and do you know what fixed it DOCSIS 3.0 and a VM superhub 2 which replaced the DOCSIS 2.0 in the cab

this needs to be rectified and fines levied against virgin when they fail to add more capacity in good time 1-2 years is not good time (they are already aware when the node is overloaded as the cab bloody reports it to them they just ignore peak time overutilized alarms between 4pm and midnight as over 24 hours ) the thing is virgin is shooting themselves as once someone has left virgin there is a very high chance they never be a VM customer again (most likely go full Sky BT or talktalk) BT/Openreach don't care if they lose customers as they always get money from line rental/retail price of VDSL with them as long as you're not on virgin cable