UK Broadband

[Ignition]

Just checking on http://www.dslreports.com/archive the list of speedtests.

The top 2 UK entries are

111 104 ntl.com 701 139 NTL Group Ltd
112 49 blueyonder.co.uk 666 146 Blue Yonder

Yup 111th and 112th.

Apparently we're behind ISPs in Mexico, Argentina, Australia, Poland, Holland, Belgium and Sweden, amongst others.

Are people happy that we have the right mix of price, performance (contention wise) and speed, or do you guys think that for whatever reason the UK's idea of 'Broadband Britain' is ending up a bit closer to 'Midband Britain'?

This is NOT aimed at any particular company by the way, not digging at either cableco or BT, just interested in if people feel they are getting good value.

Incidentally, those Canadian ISPs in the top 10, none of them are over 30 quid a month

[Richard M]

I don't think I'm getting good value, I'm paying nearly £30 a month for a Nildram 512k connection with a static IP.
While the connection is generally OK and the customer service is very good, it's not particularly fast and my pings aren't great either.

I'm not entirely happy that they've been bought by Pipex, who are crap IMO.

I'd prefer to be with NTL but it's not available in my area, despite being able to see the NTL Cardiff Bay building from where I live.
NTL is faster and also cheaper because then I wouldn't need a phone.

[MovedGoalPosts]

For all the rhetoric emerging from government over Broadband Britain, IMO we were always destined to have a second rate service. Only where big business damands and thus pays for a high speed service, will the telco's (BT, cable or other specialist) make significant investment.

We had a great opportunity in the 1980s when the concept of cable was created. Unfortunately the blinkered approach of privatisation, which was saluted to drive competition has, IMO, now been seen to stifle it in the long term.

The cable cos, having won "exclusive" franchises were always going to be in an uncertain chicken and egg position. They had to invest incredible sums of money to tear up our streets and provide new infrastructure. That would then need continued maintenance and investment to keep up with the times. Meantime they start without any customer base, and the hardest thing known to any buisiness is to win customers. In practice the burden of debt of the installation was always going to be a feature, and thus the competition to the incumbent BT was for many years artificial. Even today, the cable co's may claim to be some of the largest ISPs. But in cabled areas, what proportion of take up of cable has there been compared to Sky and BT phone line based ADSL (all providers).

Meantime during this period of cable installation, BT's hands were tied, preventing them from doing the obvious, upgrading lines and in fact providing their own cable network. BT would not have had to spend so much digging up streets. Many of their ducts were in place. A natural process of accelerated maintenance, may well have provided a wider based cable network at lesser cost. I don't know, but if BT had been allowed to provide cable services, instead of the cable cos, we might, despite the lack of physical network competition, have had a cheaper, or at least faster network today?

We already see some ISPs looking at BT's network and the possibilities of Local Loop Unbundling for the ADSL services. This is IMO the model for what could have happened. BT should have been split into two companies, rather like gas or electricity. One company deals with the infrastructure (ie transco), the other can sell and provide the services, effectively buying network time or capacity from the infrastructure company. Thus British Gas in telco terms would be the ISP, or phone service supplier company. Investment would continue in the network infrastructure as the suppliers demanded advanced facilities, which in turn they are competing to bring to market first cheaper and better than their rival suppliers. The only difficulty is ensuring the network infrastructure provider does that at an economical cost. It worked for every other nationalised and then privatised company, gas, electric, even rail had a similar model (apart from the incompetent management of the network rail or whoever the permanent way company was), so why not telcoms?

It's all hypothetical now, as we have what we have, but it does make you wonder if the government of the day got it right.

[punky]

The #1 on that list kinda suprised me. I have been to Aurora. It is a small suburb, and a small cable co. To get that performance is quite good.

How is that ltable worked out? Are they peaks? Because I have got 900-1000 on my speed tests which would put NTL around the 90s, or in the 50s if I ever get upgraded. If it goes on average, then it depends on the range of users. If only a couple have 1m and thousands have 300k, then the average will be really small, regardless of how good NTLs network is. Of course, registering your score is optional, and I have never bothered, so I wonder how true a representation of BB are the other providers.

[Ignition]

Averages punky.

Depends on range of users indeed, however the fact that those others scored so much higher suggests that they offer far far higher bandwidths. Considering ISPs averaging nearly 5Mbit downstream tells a story when in the UK that rate is simply unheard of.

Regardless of how good the network is if the services aren't being offered it's irrelevant.

[danielf]

Why is the top 10 (or thirty even) so dominated by Canadian ISP's?

[punky]

Originally Posted by danielf

Why is the top 10 (or thirty even) so dominated by Canadian ISP's?

They have always had good well funded service. They do have a lot of caps though, so it is give with one hand and take with another.

I have just checked and ACI are offering, get this, 9mbps download, 1mpbs upload for around £20, with no cap.

[danielf]

Originally Posted by punky

They have always had good well funded service. They do have a lot of caps though, so it is give with one hand and take with another.

I have just checked and ACI are offering, get this, 9mbps download, 1mpbs upload for around £20, with no cap.

What do you mean with 'well funded'?

I wouldn't mind one tenth of that service at one tenth the price

[kronas]

its hardly a suprise, im sure i have gone through this in a previous thread that we are getting a rough deal when it comes to pricing.... also the fact that the government could do something towards helping compaines to build infastructure to help business and educational institutions and further help the economy of the uk, never mind the average home user!

[punky]

Originally Posted by danielf

What do you mean with 'well funded'?

I wouldn't mind one tenth of that service at one tenth the price

Well funded, in that a lot of money has been spent to keep the quality of service up.

You don't get much choice in the matter. Only high speed (upto 9/1mbps) or dialup (which varies from £2/month to £10/month). I guess with BB it just throws it to you as fast as it can.

Not bad value for money though even with that lack of choice.

[ian@huth]

Britain has a couple of faults that push it down the league tables.

1. Companies are too interested in maximising profit and try to screw far more out of a product than they should realistically do. The same goes for the government who try to generate the maximum possible revenue from everything.
2. Companies are not customer focussed enough. On the whole they do not look after their customers and think they are doing the customer a favour, not that the customer is doing them a favour by using their products.

I don't know what the dslreports speed test league table is supposed to show. I would imagine most speed tests are run by people who think they have a problem with their connection. If you look at some of the individual speedtests in that table it makes you wonder what some of the users know about their subscribed speed. Compare what the user says they have against their speedtest result.

[danielf]

Originally Posted by punky

Well funded, in that a lot of money has been spent to keep the quality of service up.

I suppose I meant where did this money come from? Has the Canadian government pumped loads of money into BB? Is there something special about the way telecommunications are set up in Canada? If not, it would seem the rest of the world could learn something from the Canadians...

[ian@huth]

Originally Posted by danielf

Why is the top 10 (or thirty even) so dominated by Canadian ISP's?

Competition.

Companies like to extract as much money as they can from you whilst at the same time spending as little as possible. If all the ISPs in a country have fairly similar speed offerings at fairly similar pricings there is no incentive to provide anything significantly faster. If one of them suddenly provided a significantly faster service at little, if any, increase in cost then all the others would suddenly be able to do so too.

In Britain xDSL is holding advancement back. I am sure that the cablecos could provide significantly faster connections if they were pushed to do so, but why should they go to the expense of doing this if their only competition, xDSL, can't match them.

[Ignition]

Originally Posted by danielf

I suppose I meant where did this money come from? Has the Canadian government pumped loads of money into BB? Is there something special about the way telecommunications are set up in Canada? If not, it would seem the rest of the world could learn something from the Canadians...

Simple really. Most Canadians get their TV via cable, so the cable networks were widespread, and there is constant competition between these cable networks and the incumbent telco.

In Canada at the moment xDSL wins by a small margin on price, cable wins on speed.

[MysticKiller]

UK sucks awfually for Broadband both speed and price wise. In sweden you can get a 10mbit download and 10mbit upload connection for about the price of our 750k. Its unlimited bandwhith too.