Upto ....

[DieDieMyDarling]

I thought it would be interesting to see what people's thoughts were on this subject:

With the new 10mb upgrade, ntl have started using the ADSL line of 'up to' whatever speed. But what are the rules of such a service, if indeed there are any.

How do people view such a service, and at what point would they find it unacceptable? For example, you pay 37.99 a month for up to 10mb, at what speeds do you start to think this isn't on?
If there was a steady speed of 8-9mb i'm sure very, very few would think anything untoward about that, but of course many of us would complain if we were on 10k download speed.

So what is the line? At what point would you phone CS and complain about your speeds? And do we as customers have any rights to expect a certain speed from an 'up to' service?

Personally speaking, considering that we have been upgraded from 3mb, and the next teir under that was 2mb, i think as 'up to 10mb' customers now, we should expect MORE than 3mb, anything under that is unacceptable, as we'd be paying the higher price, yet getting a service that was meant for middle teir services.

The subject becomes even more emotive, when you add to it that there are now caps enforced (or will be) on the service. But as many people have stated, the cap won't stop the networks getting clogged, especially at peak times. Even if everyone stays within the caps, there are still gonna be times when there are just too many people connected, and the result will be low speeds for everyone.

Are there any consumer laws for this subject yet? Do customers have any rights, or do they just have to put up with what they get, or go elsewhere?

Bear in mind, i'm not talking about what we should expect now, as the 10mb service hasn't been officiailly rolled out yet, and the networks probably aren't ready. I'm thinking more about 3 months down the line, when things are in place and it's a proper teired service.

[ian@huth]

NTL cable broadband is a contended service. If it wasn't you would not be getting 10 Mbps for £37.99. A contended service relies on peoples usage fitting the profile of the target market that the service was designed for.

As there is only around 38 Mbps available on the UBR for the area of which you are a part it doesn't take much maths skills to work out that only four customers trying to max out their 10 Mbps connection will result in none of them getting the full whack. As there are probably several hundred customers on that UBR it is also obvious that there will be a fair percentage of them online at the same time, particularly in the evening and at weekends, each taking up part of that 38 Mbps. Many users will find it impossible to get the full 10 Mbps with only a very small fraction of the NTL user base on that tier. As more and more of the user base gets upgraded so the chance of getting full whack will reduce.

The saving grace is that most users will not be running applications which utilize the full bandwidth available. There will however be users who try to download the entire internet at full whack 24/7 but their usage at that rate will be short lived. Those bandwidth hogs and everyone else on the UBR that they use will suffer a deterioration in speed until such time as their usage is curtailed, which it will, one way or another.

Due to the contended nature of NTL's broadband service there will be times, many times, when users will only get a fraction of the 10 Mbps. There are no consumer laws which could be used if you find you are only getting a fraction of the tier speed that you are on. Your only recourse would be to look elsewhere for an ISP that has a product that better fits your needs if one actually exists.

[BarFly]

Its is a tough one to call, & i think NTL have pretty much covered themselves with the "upto" 10mb.

Personally i would find anything below 3mb during peak times to be unacceptable, & perhaps around the 5/6mbps during off peak useage to be below unacceptable levels. I would expect my connection though to sit above these speeds the majority of time...

As RDHW as said it will be very difficult to continually get your full 10mb 24/7 & especially if the caps are enforced people wont be maxing there connections continually, so people are going to have to use common sense about this, but i feel this is going to be where it all falls over, as for some reason, internet / speed & common sense never tend to go hand in hand...

Regards

Barfly

[Chrysalis]

Their is no argument for expecting full 10mbit throughput in the evenings but I think ntl will have a big problem if pings and general latency go through the roof.

[fluff]

Well the service provided to me at the moment is great and I have nothing to complain about. I'm sure NTL have done their homework.

I thought NTL had always said their services were 'up to' xxx Mb. They'd be on a hiding to nothing otherwise.

I have no idea where the limit is, below which you could have a case against them. Perhaps you could say you should have 90% of the speed you're paying for, at least 75% of the time? I don't know.

It's an interesting question. Let's hear what people have to say - but, there are more than enough 10Mb threads on here already, let's keep off the specifics of the NTL upgrade in this thread please.

[DieDieMyDarling]

The older speeds were always specific, well they were when i saw them mentioned.
The problem is, now that the speeds are getting so high, and each UBR is so limited in relation, it's going to be very difficult to get anywhere near the actual speed listed.

The main reason i asked the question in the first place, was because of the stories coming from people on ADSL. People on services that are advertised as 'up to 8mb' getting less than 1mb, which surely can't be acceptable?

In theory ntl could get off with anything really, by saying 'upto', but there must be a limit. Mainly for people who sign up for the 12 month contract, and get maybe 10% of the advertised speed, surely they must have some legal rights, where they can opt out of the contract, if something isn't done to correct it?

[slowcoach]

I think we will see the same as the loan advertisements in the future where the APR displayed has to be the rate which most punters will get, so instead of ADSL+ "Up to 24Mb/s" they will have to say something like AverageRealSpeed (ARS 9Mb/s) or whatever.
But then if you are relying on BT wiring even ARS could be misleading, 512Kb/s max here, less than 2km from the exchange thank God for cable.

[fluff]

ARS is a good idea. I'm a fair way from the exchange so I can only receive 2mbit. I had to switch to cable to get highspeed

[patrickp]

There's a different reason why people on ADSL often can't get the optimum speeds, and that's that they are connected to their local exchange with copper. This means that the greater the distance between themselves and the exchange, the more noise there is on the line and the less the likelihood of their getting the optimum speeds.

ntl's cable system uses fibre right up to the street boxes, however, which means very little effective signal loss, so the critical distance for ntl customers is that from the box to their house - and that's _much_ less than any but the most favourably located BT customers.

So it's clear that the ntl network is capable of providing much greater speeds to a much greater proportion of their customers than ADSL providers can. However, poor maintenance and contention ratios can eat into this. The same applies for ADSL as well, of course.

[Chrysalis]

NTL have a much more points where they are vulnerable to contention.

UBR which is only 4 times the size of the customer's new burst rate.
Proxies, having this in between the customer and the target website is another potential contetion point.
Peering congestion, adsl isp's can also suffer from this but ntl seem to have it quite bad at the moment.

[Robster]

I think once you get up to this kind of speed level essentially what you're paying for is the amount of data you download as opposed to how fast you download it, especially when everyone is on the same speed.

For the vast majority of users who are mostly just surfing, once the speed gets above about 2meg, having anything faster than that won't really make much difference to them.

Having said that, as I am (like a lot of people on here) not "the vast majority of users" given 10meg I think I would probably complain if the speed was consistently below about 6meg.

[Chrysalis]

In general I would expect no contention in quiet periods and low contention in the evening, and traffic shaping to prioritise small packets.

[mcmanic]

i would say is not acceptable when they blame the network rather than the modems that are out on their network which cannot do a full 10meg in the 1st place. Its ok for new customers who get the new modems but i bet there is loads/thousands out there who haven't a clue and are basically being ripped off without them knowing, after all i don't see NTL rushing about replacing these customers modems or sending out letters to ALL customers that require a new modem but are gladly taking the full monthly payments.

[Graham M]

Originally Posted by fluff

ARS is a good idea. I'm a fair way from the exchange so I can only receive 2mbit. I had to switch to cable to get highspeed

I reckon the Acronym should be changed to Average Real SpEed