News UK ISPs quizzed over advertised broadband speeds

damn straight

i get 2MB here and i pay for 8 but will be moving house shortly to somewhere only 100m away from the local exchange if i dont get at least 6 there ill be pissed

 

BT actually proposed to roll out fibre (or was it high-speed cable?) in the 80s, IIRC and the government rejected it. We're still running age-old copper...

 

Obviously these things have to be paid for, but the government could finance it with debt and recoup by selling the finished product to e.g. BT, or could service the debt using the revenues generated by the new network, which would be substantial. Of course, they should start with highly populated urban areas first, then use the revenues from existing parts of the network to finance a rolling expansion to farther flung parts of this fair nation.

In any event, I'd happily see some of my tax go towards this, rather than to finance the war in Iraq, endless rearrangement of the deckchairs on the Titanic, and the employment of yet more bureaucrats, administrators, health and safety zealots, purveyors of reams of useless regulations and statistic, and general busybodies

 

Makes sense - what use was there, really, for high bandwidth data connectivity to the home in the 80s? The only thing in those days that would soak up the kind of bandwidth that requires fibre would be telephone switchboards in large offices. Now, however, we could really use a fibre network and it is irritating that BT is rolling out 21CN on the back of copper.

 

Well the plan was focused around "the future" of internet service in people's homes, which BT rightly predicted was broadband. Obviously, the technology has only recently become available here, but there's a good reason why the Swedes, Japanese and whatnot are miles ahead of the UK when it comes to broadband. They invested in infrastructure early on.

 

4mbit via virgin here and I'm lucky if I can get 120k/s down.
During the evenings when the GP comes online to check their internets it slows to a crawl.... as in it takes 2 minutes to go from clicking my bittech bookmark, and having everything loaded. TWO MINUTES. That's with pipelining, too.

 

im on virgins 20mb service and thier 3gig at peak times 4pm - 12am or face a 75% throttle for £38 is insulting.

im on the virge of flipping over to BE but first im going to have a chat with the director of customer services at virgin. 6 years with blue yonder only to have virgin take over and pull this **** is not on.

 

I have 8Mbit BT and am about 1/2 mile form the exchange so I don't expect to be hitting that speed all the time. I occasionally get it but more often than not it is a fair bit lower. The other big problem is that I am finding that with a few sites I am obviously being throttled by their upload speed rather than my available download speed.

Oh and don't even get me started on the Home Hub...........

 

probly your pc is slow (Vista with 512mb/1gb ram with norton or macfee installed maybe ?) or you got an problem with your cable modem,
make sure you getting broadband from an Cable modem, Not from the TV for broadband as it sucks alot if so get NTL/Virgin to send some one out to fit an cable modem for your broadband

or it May be you have got 1mb bb when you think you got 4mb or may be paying for 4mb Most Cable TV boxs only give 1/2mb bb

cables network is fully fiber untill it gets to the green boxs but even then its down thick cables i get full speed when the web site can give me full spead as you got to rember your connection can some times be faster then what the web site can give it out at

with BT (just about evey provider ) its hit and miss what adsl speed you get and if there is an problem thay tend to blame your pc find it faster to just change provider

 

my problem is not of speed, almost all the time I get full speed but that tisacli mess around with bit torrent packets whish I would like to use to lower sever load on large files like linux distros and NOT ilegal files due to massive lack of anonominity with bit torrent.

 

Totally agree with the article

Well for me, someone who works for a bb company (I work for an ADSL provider). I have to agree with the state of bb in the UK. I mean ok, the cable companies will give you the speed they advertise. I currently have the virginmedia 20Mb bb package. But what they fail to tell you half the time (and by no means is it shown when your looking at the website) is that fair enough they will give you 20Mb. But if you download more than 3Gb per day then your connection is capped for the rest of the day! Ok so you get unlimited DL but whats the point if it's crawling along at 1Mb when you are supposed to get 20Mb!!

And as for the ADSL providers!! Jesus!! Honestly some of the customers are sold a MAX package which promises an "up to 8Mb speed", and the sales staff know fine well that the customer will not get those speeds (it only takes a few seconds to check what the maximum speeds a line can handle). Then after that a customer will phone up saying that "hey i'm only getting 40Kb a second", and I'll say "Well sir you'll be lucky if your line can handle a 1Mb speed". Then they go onto say that "Well I was promised that I would receive 8Mb no questions asked!"

It is really shocking the way some bb customers are treated. Hopefully with the 21CN rollout these problems will slowly go away!

 

It is there if you look http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html & you shouldn't get throttled from 20Mb to 1Mb but 5Mb.
Personally I don't know what you lot do that means that you use 3Gb every day but hey ...

Gunsmith, if you are still paying £38 for 20Mb BB only 'phone up retentions - I pay that for XL BB, XL TV & 'phone.

 

That 3GB limit isn't all day, it's just between 4pm and midnight. I don't find it an isse, most of my downloading happens in the morning. And I'm only paying £29 a month.

 

Verizon only offers 50mbps up and 5mbps down through FiOS for $90 a month (google says about 63 euros). We must be way behind!

 

I must admit I'm starting to get pissed with all this traffic throttling etc.
I don't mind traffic prioritisation going to things like game and voip traffic but if I want to download something (legal or not) with the 'unlimited' connection I pay for, I want to do it when I please at a decent speed.
I HATE it when I can't download a patch for a game cos I'm throttled to some pishy 40kb/s.
That's not what I'm paying the extra for an unlimited account for!!! /rant

 

i paid or an up to 8mb with virgin, £18/month and was only getting 0.7mb download speeds. i phoned them up and asked to cancel my contract and they then offered to put me on an IP Stream (whatever that is) which should guarantee me a 2mb connection and they lowered my price to 15/month. im still getting around 0.7mb download speed but i can now play online games which is good enough for me.

 

Fibre to the Home is a pipedream, the best we can hope for is Fibre to the Cabinet.

 

If you have ADSL the connection speed depends on how far you are from the line distribution-central in your neighboorhood. If you are 10meter to 1km away from the central then 8mbit is a highly possible speed indication. If you are 10km away the signal is to weak to give you full 8mbit range.