Ofcom report on ADSL Max packages

and to confuse things even further, you've got zillions of people who live near the exchange and have great lines with solid 8128/448 synchs and get nothing like those speeds. that's what these articles should also mention: the lack of investment in capacity by some of these larger isps is shocking.

i was at my mates mums house fixing her laptop and i was trying to explain that BT were a terrible isp. so i checked her stats and they reported back the maximum (which i knew they would. she lives a stones throw from the exchange). i then did a speedtest at around 1pm and got 2.7mb. of course she was oblivious to anything i was trying to explain to her.

and it makes me mad to think also of all the mis-selling that BT can get away with. she's paying 40 a month for line/rental broadband combined and she doesn't hardly use the net. she has the "Unlimited Evening & Weekend Plan" so the line rental isn't that much. and she thought she was getting a good deal. :(
 
The problem I have with this whole thing is that people complain about being sold "up to 8mb broadband" etc and complain when they don't get 8mb, but afaik it's common practice for ISPs to do a check before the customer signs up clearly showing/telling the customer what speed they are likely to get.

Saying that you're paying for 8mb and only getting 2 just shows ignorance, in general the cost the the ISP for serving 8mb ADSL Max and 2mb ADSL Max is negligible. And what are companies supposed to advertise? "Come to AOL and get... errr... Some kind of speed but we don't know what really" makes good copy :D

In general though this report is complete and utter tripe for one reason and one reason only: traffic shaping. It doesn't seem to take into account that VM limit a lot of their packages it may be ok for the average consumer and they may not get near the limit but the internet is getting bigger and bigger, limiting customer's download is restrictive and not in the interests of the customer.

That is all.
 
BBC journalism has taken a high speed nose dive over the last 3 or 4 years. I'm not at all surprised that a technical article is written by someone who knows nothing about it. The whole point of having correspondents of different specialties is that they have at least some knowledge of the situation.

In addition, investigative journalism is dead. No one goes out to LOOK for news or ratify statements. Most of the BBCs website on an average day consists of regurgitated press releases. A reporter of old school teaching would read that report and immediately call upon an "expert" to analyse it and extract the key points and validate it's accuracy. How often do you see "we spoke to industry expert <name>" in an article.

As for Ofcom, they're like any "indipendant" government appointed watchdog agency, they rarely have a clue what their doing and are paid lots of money to produce reports telling us what we already know or nothing at all. Most government published statistics are inherantly flawed in at least one way. Most commonly by not using a standard metric for comparison as is true in this case.
 
pxmm said:
They also completely ignore the throughput the connections achieve.

My poor line may only give me 8.5mb from Be, but I get close to 8mb throughput ALL the time; the 'is faster than' all 10mb VM might beat that in a speedtest, but that's about it;)
Click to expand...

There is no way you are getting 8mb throughput on a 8.5mb sync.

You are getting 7.3 at best imo
 
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