Auditel Consultant:
Nick Beaumont-Jones

Broadband speeds improve – but there’s still a way to go …

06 Aug 2010 | Filed under: Industry Comment, Technology

Ofcom reckons that the UK’s average actual fixed line residential broadband speeds have increased by over 25% over the past year from 4.1Mb to 5.2Mb per second.

Pressure from internet service providers (ISP) who are claiming ever faster speeds in their packages may have something to do with this trend but there is a growing gap between speeds claimed and those being delivered. This is partly caused by the predominance of copper lines originally designed for calls only rather than fibre optic cables.

This is why Virgin Media, with the fastest service, are able to claim speeds of up to 50Mbps. They are using the cable largely put down years ago and their service is available to 49% of the UK population. However, acording to the Ofcom research, Virgin Media’s average speed over 24 hours only reaches 36.7Mbps at best. Their second service claims up to 20Mbps but only reaches 16.5Mbs at best over 24 hours.

The full story can be found through the link below. There you can see what you should be getting from your ISP.

http://media.ofcom.org.uk/2010/07/27/ofcom-research-reveals-increase-in-uk%e2%80%99s-average-actual-broadband-speed-but-consumers-still-not-achieving-advertised-speeds/