It was no surprise to me read in the Guardian earlier this month that broadband speeds in the UK were typically 42 per cent slower than advertised.
According to the newspaper’s investigation many internet service providers were short changing their customers, signing them up for an average of 12MB per second but only supplying 7MB per second.
Sky, Virgin, BT and TalkTalk were all named in the article but what causes the widespread disparity between the bandwidth you pay for and the one you actually get?
Well, BT’s tired old copper network doesn’t help, although they are rolling out fibre optic cables nationwide so by 2017 they should reach 90 per cent of homes. But if you haven’t got a spare five years to wait for that to happen you could always splurge £1000 on your very own fibre optic line. Or not.
In truth, it’s not just BT’s battered copper lines causing the problem. Many providers have speed and traffic shaping policies, which basically means that providers can control the volume of internet traffic at any given time and that means, yep, you guessed, a really slow service for you, the customer, at peak imes. At Glide we don’t run a congested network and we don’t practise traffic shaping but you can read all about why we’re better here.
So what’s the future of broadband? We really can’t compete economically with other countries without more competitive broadband speeds. Unfortunately broadband is a data based market and in the future we’re all likely to be spending more on it rather than less. Let’s just hope that in time we’ll start to get what we’ve actually paid for.