Quote:
Originally Posted by AbyssUnderground
In my eyes, no company should be allowed to call their service "unlimited" if they artificially change or throttle the speed to that lower than you are paying for, for ANY amount of time.
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That's part of the problem - what you're paying for is an 'up to' connection, with Terms & Conditions attached. No ISP* has enough capacity to give every user their theoretical maximum simultaneously: it's a product of contention, subscription numbers, the burst model of download, and so on and so forth. There's no minimum either. At the moment there's no SLA on Virgin's broadband offering, other than "you will have a connection". If you want guarantees this is the wrong industry. Too many variables.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AbyssUnderground
Ofcom can do it, so why don't they?
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Well, OFCOM have it within their theoretical power, but not within their actual power. Enforcing minimum service levels would cripple most broadband providers (see note from above), and BT and Virgin would be ruined. I mean, average broadband speed in the UK is, what,
3.6Mb, multiply that by the 15 million odd subscribers and you're looking of backbone requirements of, er, 54Tb. Which is faster than the
world record and about 1500 times faster than the current
biggest pipe in deployment.
Given the choice between maintaining the status quo or some combination of; drastically reducing headline speeds across the board, requiring ISPs to increase their capacity by several orders of magnitude, admitting that all internet speed advertising is effectively meaningless; they'll go with the former.
Though the ASA did slap Virgin for the most recent campaign, so it's not all doom and gloom.
---------- Post added at 15:38 ---------- Previous post was at 15:34 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
Surely this is because people are aware of STM and modifying their downloads accordingly?
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Yes, and, indeed, no.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by OFCOM
The research also revealed that, while 91% of consumers said that speed was an important consideration when signing up with their current broadband provider, 28% of them were unaware of the headline speed package they purchased.
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Caveat lector and all, but lots of people remain unaware of STM despite the fact it's been on the VM network for well over a year. You've also got to remember that (according to the bumpf) traffic management for that small number improves speeds for the majority.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
The only true way to know what %age would be affected, would be to tell everyone STM was no longer in force and then monitor how many would have been stm'd.
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That's unlikely to happen, as that action in and of itself would probably constitute a violation of terms and conditions. It's certainly possible to examine traffic usage according to time of day, so you could see if heavier downloaders were avoiding peak times, but that action is to everyone's benefit; it's like keeping lorries off the road during rush hour.
* There's probably an exception somewhere. I'm generalising wildly here.