subject: Are Changing Habits To Blame For Bad Broadband? [print this page] Ofcom carry out a consumer broadband report every year and this year's results are suggesting that more and more are less than satisfied with the download speeds that they are currently experiencing.
A drop of 5 percent over the last two years may not seem like a massive concern but a current change in internet habits' may see more and more tick the unsatisfied box in Ofcoms 2011 report.
Back in 2008 fewer people where aware of streaming or downloading films but ever since the massive rise in legal movie players more and more are catching up on the shows they missed online.
Whilst this may be a naive assumption I would be willing to bet that only a small percentage of those who have recently taken up streaming and download films and TV shows haven't upgraded their broadband deals to help cope with the extra use.
This is by no means the fault of the consumer I personally have one of the fastest broadband packages but in reality I never reach those speeds and it is this reason why more are becoming unsatisfied with their broadband speeds.
Since we are downloading and streaming more we are more aware of download speeds, so surely we should be downloading at the speeds we are paying for right?
Wrong. Unfortunately, despite the big bold letters saying super fast 20 meg broadband the small print will always say that speeds will vary from area to area and the sad truth is very few consumers will actually reach the speeds advertised, but never the less many will sign up to a new package believing that the speed in big bold letters will be the one that they get.
In truth this has been an issue for a while and to be fair to providers they are becoming more transparent about the varying speeds each user may experience.
So getting down to it heavy usage and ever increasing advertised speeds have made consumers more aware of their download speeds, yet this isn't the real issue. The simple fact is that the UKs current broadband network just isn't up to the job of heavy usage but fear not fibre optic cables are on the way to save us from the dreaded buffering screen.
Whether a connection is with fibre can be discovered in sites such as is plusnet any good.
This time last year fibre optic broadband was being heralded as the future and in that time some broadband providers has begun a massive amount of work to lay as many fibre optic cables as they can. Fibre optics can deliver high speeds and handle a lot of traffic at peak times.
Unfortunately we might have to all upgrade to fibre optics to continue being able to stream and download smoothly, and if we do I doubt many will be ticking the unsatisfied box in future Ofcom consumer broadband reports.
