Speed is of the essence - except for broadband users, it seems

Published on Monday 24 September 2007 00:06

MOST British households with an internet connection are now using broadband in preference to dial-up connections.

But the extra speed promised by broadband is rarely delivered, according to research, while the government fears that even the fastest connections may be holding British consumers back compared with the technology in other countries.

Ministers are considering intervening in the way broadband is rolled out, in an effort to speed up the deployment of super-fast services. Stephen Timms, the minister for competitiveness, last week ordered a summit to look at the role of government in providing next-generation broadband.

While other countries are investing in new ways to deliver higher bandwidth, the UK is seen as lagging behind.

Mr Timms said broadband infrastructure was one of his "personal priorities".

"Today we face a new challenge. Other countries are starting to invest in new, fibre-based infrastructure, delivering considerably higher bandwidth than is available in the UK today," Mr Timms told the Broadband Stakeholder Group and others attending a meeting. "I have decided to chair a high-level summit later this year to consider the circumstances that might trigger public sector intervention and the form that intervention might take."

Richard Allan, a member of the Broadband Stakeholder Group and director of government affairs at Cisco, said the UK needs to act now in order to keep its place in the top 25 per cent of broadband nations.

"That should be one of the targets that the government sets if it wants to stay economically competitive," he said.

Mr Allan believes that the UK should have 40 per cent of its citizens connected to a fibre-optic system that can deliver broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps (megabits per second) by 2012.

"The current copper-based system is limited by ADSL, which means 24 megabits under very good conditions," he said.

It is estimated that upgrading the whole of the UK to a network based on fibre-optics could cost 10 billion-15 billion.

While other countries, including France, Germany and Italy, are already looking at ways of improving the access network or "last-mile" network which connects to individual homes, there is so far little investment in the UK.

Research published last week revealed that broadband speeds in the UK are much slower than advertised by internet service providers.

Some 3,000 readers of Computeractive magazine took part in speed tests, with 62 per cent finding they routinely got less than half of the top speed advertised by their provider. It is the latest in a series of questions over the way net firms advertise broadband services.

The figures were gathered from more than 100,000 speed tests that the 3,000 respondents carried out to build up a picture of their average internet-browsing speed on ADSL lines.

Statistics show that half of current broadband users in the UK receive ADSL services that should run at speeds between 1Mbps and 4Mbps. The other 50 per cent are on deals offering up to 8Mbps, but the Computeractive survey tests revealed that, in reality, very few achieve the top speeds.

"This problem has been building for a while with a growing gulf between what is advertised and what is delivered," said Paul Allen, editor of Computeractive.

"The adverts often have super-fast broadband in huge lettering with the 'up to' clause in very small print," he added.

About one-third of the 3,000 respondents who took part in the ADSL speed test found that they received less than one-quarter of their maximum advertised bandwidth.

While consumers might currently not notice their sluggish connections, this could change, Mr Allen believes.

"Previously it has not been a massive issue, but in the coming year we are entering the net TV age, and video content is bandwidth-hungry," he said.

Mr Allen called on regulator Ofcom to provide an independent speed test to anyone who has signed up to receive broadband.

A spokesman for Ofcom said: "We are looking at this issue. It is not a huge driver of complaints, but it has come on to our radar screen.

"It's about the difference between the headline rate and the rate received."

The spokesman said Ofcom was working with the internet industry and other organisations, such as consumer group Which?, to investigate the extent of the problem and what can be done about it.

"Once we have carried out this work we will assess what options might be available to tackle it," he said. The results of the investigation would be made available in the "near future", he said.

Another survey last month, by Which?, found that consumers with services promising speeds of up to 8Mbps were actually getting an average speed of 2.7Mbps.

But there is some good news for broadband consumers. Figures from Ofcom show that the majority of complaints during 2005 were about phone line faults rather than customer service by internet providers. Only 7 per cent of complaints were about providers not making it easy for customers to switch to another provider, while 4 per cent about loss of service.

And another study claims that 67 per cent of Scottish broadband customers are happy with their service, compared with 50 per cent of users across the UK.

The survey of more than 500 broadband users was carried out by independent market research company, Pure Profile, and included customers of AOL, BT, Orange, Pipex, Sky, TalkTalk, Tiscali and Virgin.