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Author Topic: Broadband ISPs 'mislead' public  (Read 1117 times)

Offline Clive

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Broadband ISPs 'mislead' public
« on: February 19, 2008, 16:29 »
Internet providers have been accused of misleading the public over broadband speeds, following the results of a survey of more than 18,500 customers.

Comparison site Broadband-Expert.co.uk claims that despite many ISPs promoting 8Mbps connections, UK broadband users only get an average download speed of 2.95Mbps.

William Harvey, technical director at Broadband-Expert.co.uk, said: ?Despite ongoing pressure from Ofcom and various consumer groups, broadband providers are still misleading the public over broadband speeds.?

"Current advertising campaigns like the one for Tiscali promise superfast broadband (download) speeds of up to 8Mb. Yet Tiscali came bottom of our test results with an average actual download speed of just 1.72Mb. Now that is not superfast by any stretch of the imagination and is over 1Mb lower than the UK average."

However, a spokeswoman for Tiscali has said the ISP is keen to see how Broadband-Expert.co.uk produced its data and how large its sample size of Tiscali customers was.

The spokeswoman said: ?It is unfortunate that Broadband Expert decided to single out Tiscali for criticism, but their findings are not consistent with other recent (and sustained) findings. Two recent reports place Tiscali in the Top 5 for performance and both have reported Tiscali's prior consistency.?

Last week, measurement company Epitiro released its latest rankings of ISPs in the UK monitoring factors such as ping rates, upload and download speeds and DNS (domain name server) performance. Tiscali ranked in the top five alongside BT, PlusNet, O2 and Orange.

For the results of the Broadband-Expert.co.uk speed test, click on the 'Speed Test Results' tab towards the bottom of this page.

SPEED TEST


Online Simon

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Re: Broadband ISPs 'mislead' public
« Reply #1 on: February 19, 2008, 17:22 »
Not sure of the accuracy of that site.  Apparently I have a download speed of 9.3Mbps, when it's only supposed to be up to 8Mb, and my BT profile is 4000.   :-\
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Offline sam

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Re: Broadband ISPs 'mislead' public
« Reply #2 on: February 19, 2008, 18:18 »
gotta love virgin.. free upgrade from 4mbps to 10mbps
- sam | @starrydude --

Offline Clive

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Re: Broadband ISPs 'mislead' public
« Reply #3 on: February 19, 2008, 23:12 »
Mine is just .340 Mb.  Pretty normal!  >:(

Online Simon

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Re: Broadband ISPs 'mislead' public
« Reply #4 on: February 19, 2008, 23:44 »
Oh dear, that's tragic, Clive!   :)x
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Offline Clive

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Re: Broadband ISPs 'mislead' public
« Reply #5 on: February 20, 2008, 10:05 »
How I hate smug people!   :bartmoon:


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