[Chrysalis]

this is long overdue and I reckon ntl targeted bulldog since they are a weak target and it sets a precedent for all adsl providers. Their was a real danger of when BT rolled outadsl2+ on their platform that we would see advertised 24mbit speeds with people on poorest lines getting under 1mbit.

The 2 key problems with way adsl1 is sold.

1 - it only gives a max of 7.15mbit "including" tcp overheads.
2 - its dependent on line conditions, the article got BT of lightly they using 3.8km as a figure for 8mbit boundary when in truth its much lower meaning a much higher % then 35% cant get the max speeds. When they say live from exchange one would assume straight distance which makes it even worse here is a example my line.

Straight line distance 1.65km
Real line distance 2.96km
Achievable stable synch rate 4mbit.
Line attenuation 50

The reason for this is my line clearly has some poor quality cabling or joints somewhere pushing the attenuation up which BT still wont look into since they base all their diagnosis on the attenuation figure over everything else, if someone had a attenuation of 40 on a 500m line BT would probably assume the line is long and thats the reason rather then investigating it. Also my real line distance is considerably over the straight distance.

I would expect many more lines are like mine and I think its a lot more then 35% and I would say more then 50% that cant get full synchs and stable.