subject: Broadband News: Average speeds on the increase [print this page] Broadband News: Average speeds on the increase
Broadband internet connections have become the must-have item in our daily lives as more and more services become geared to providing help and assistance quickly and easily online, instead of having to speak to a helpline. It also has become a vital utility, as important as running water or central heating in our modern homes.
But the problem that has plagued many internet service providers in the UK has been the current infrastructure they have to use to provide their services to us. ADSL broadband works over the existing copper wires that have been used to provide us telephone services by BT. Unfortunately these are susceptible to degradation in broadband services over long distances - the further away you are from your telephone exchange, the slower your connection will be.
Virgin Media has already been offering its customers broadband over its fibre optic network, and BT is slowly upgrading their exchanges across the country to fibre optic connections, advertising to users that they can get speeds of up to 40mbps.
The main problem with these home broadband speed estimates have been their unreliable nature. OFCOM, the telecommunications regulator, has already expressed its concerns in the matter as more and more ISPs provide claims of the ability to provide speeds higher than is realistically possible.
In a survey carried out by the regulator, it found that across all the different internet service providers claiming speeds up to 20mbps, most broadband providers were only able to provide half, or sometimes a quarter of that. Only Virgin Media was able to provide speeds close to their estimates.
They also noted that though this is misleading customers into believing they would be able to get faster speeds than were logically possible, the average broadband speeds consumers are now getting have risen from last year's average, to 6.2mbps. This compares with an advertised average of 13.8mpbs.
This is altogether an annoyance for the consumer. However, the positive is that with BT's introduction of fibre optic services to through their retail division, other ISPs offering unbundled' services will be able to take advantage of the updated infrastructure and offer competitive fibre optic broadband services.
