The State of UK Broadband — Not So Fast

Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."

Comments

I've tried wrangling with BT over this

[OneSmartFellow]

I'm supposed to have a 8MB connection. I've checked the distance to my DSLAM, and I'm well within the distance that 8M should be possible.

I've got a good modem/router - Alcatel Speedtouch - which lets me run diagnostics on the line. The diagnostics report that my signal to noise ratio is just within the limits to establish an aDSL session (from memory it's 9dB), and certainly nowhere close to being able to run at max speed (which would need a S/N of something like 50+dB).

I've contacted BT about the poor state of my line, and they basically ignore me. Actually, it's worse than that, they lied to me claiming that they have tried to contact me by phone, but I provided only my cell phone number and my e-mail, and there is no record of any missed calls from BT, just an e-mail claiming they tried to call. (not to mention that I always have it switched on and within easy ear-shot during working hours).

I guess they just suck !

Re:I've tried wrangling with BT over this

[Firkragg14]

Your on ADSL. The way ADSL works is that you get quoted a theoretical maximum speed and then you in fact get something completely different which is nothing like what you were quoted. The sad thing is that its considered acceptable by DSL companies to supply a connection that is in reality 25%-50% slower than the quoted speed.

Re:I've tried wrangling with BT over this

[cgenman]

To be fair, DSL companies really have no idea how dirty your line will be until it is fully hooked up. Is it a problem in your house? Last mile copper? Switch box? Nobody really has a way of knowing, and it is bloody expensive to find out.

They're not stiffing people through neglect or malice, but rather because of technological limitations.

Re:I've tried wrangling with BT over this

[iangoldby]

The 9 dB figure quoted is the signal to noise margin. With adaptive rate ADSL (maxDSL) the DSLAM and modem negotiate a target noise margin, and sync at whatever speed is necessary to achieve this.

The target noise margin starts off at 6 dB. If this results in an unstable connection then the target gets increased, first to 9 dB, and then to 12 dB, and finally to 15 dB.

So 9 dB is really not that bad. It means that the quality of your line varies a bit, but not too much. The more your line quality varies, the higher the target noise margin that is automatically set.

The point of having a higher target noise margin is that when the line quality deteriorates after the modems have synced and the noise margin drops, it wont drop as far - that is - it starts from a higher value.

As the noise margin drops, first of all error correction kicks in. That can correct a certain amount of data corruption. As the noise margin drops further the error correction becomes inadequate and some packets get dropped because they contain uncorrectable errors.

Once the line starts dropping packets then the data transfer speed plummets because those packets have to be requested again. Soon you reach the point where even a simple text-only web page takes several minutes to load, or just times out.

Eventually as the noise margin approaches zero, the modem loses sync. At this point it will probably resync automatically, but this time at a much lower rate in order to re-establish the original target noise margin. If this happens regularly then BT's systems will automatically increase your target noise margin to try to prevent this happening as often.

The final insult is that when the modem resyncs at a slower speed, BT's systems reset your 'IP Profile' to match your new sync speed. The IP Profile is effectively a cap on the data rate (not the sync speed).

Note that this adjustment to your IP Profile happens immediately when your modem resyncs slower, but not when your modem resyncs faster. In the latter case your line has to remain stable at the higher speed for five days before BT will put your IP Profile back up.

With fixed-rate ADSL it is a little different. There is no target noise margin - the modem just connects at the fixed speed and the noise margin you get is just whatever it happens to be. Fixed rate doesn't do error connection so it generally needs a higher noise margin than adaptive rate to avoid retransmissions. But the good news is that there is no IP profile rate cap, so when a period of poor line performance ends your download speeds will recover immediately.

Now, what was the question?...

Headline speed isn't that important

[shin0r]

Headline speed isn't everything.

"Unlimited" offers that are actually very limited, FUPs, throttling, packet shaping, off-peak, on-peak, web caching, port blocking, Phorm; - no wonder with all this crap the average customer is confused about their connection.

I will now shamelessly plug http://superawesomebroadband.com/ and get me coat.

Re:Before or after throttling?

[Firkragg14]

Im on virgin and yes they will throttle your download if you download more than a certain number of gigabytes between their busiest times which is fair enough. I prefer that to a download limit dont you. In my experience though it doesnt alter my ping so you have some other problem going on there. My tip with virgin is to do any of your large downloading in the evening or at night.

Re:Before or after throttling?

[Mushdot]

I've been really happy with my Virgin connection. I've never had an unannounced loss of service and my downloading speeds stay pretty constant, though not near the actual speed of the advertised package im on. I get my broadband and tv through a cable point which I think would increase the reliability?

I agree that I would rather have my speed throttled than penalised in some other way. The only bummer is when you hit your limit when there's only a small part of a file left to go and you have to wait another hour for it to trickle through.

I also noticed I was getting 800k/s download speeds the other night and then got an email from Virgin telling me they had upgraded my broadband speed for free, so I can't complain too much.

Re:Before or after throttling?

[AlterRNow]

I don't know about your experience but going from ( download ) 1000kb/s -> 30Kb/s and ( upload ) 45kb/s -> 11kb/s looks like throttling to me.

Get Be broadband

[Nursie]

24Mbps, static IP address, 19 quid a month.

Sure, due to line quality I only get about 11-14Mbps, but that's ok.

They don't seem to throttle at all, torrenting stuff is nice and fast, as are my frequent OS downloads/net installs. No caps either AFAICT.

Re:Get Be broadband

[master811]

There is a downside to using Be*, and it's that the Speedtouch routers they give you are pretty crap, and have a habit of overheating and requiring reseting, this may be causing some of your problems.

I've not had any experience with the very latest v7, but i know for sure the v5 and v6 routers have numerous problems with buggy firmware and overheating.

Re:Before or after throttling?

[ndixon]

BT deny any form of throttling, yet if I download at any time of day via FTP I get ~450kB/s, it is morning now and with HTTP I can get 300kB/s, in the evening more like 50-80kB/s. Crazy, seems BT throttle port 80.

Deny?

BT's Fair Usage Policy states:

BT continuously monitors network performance and may restrict the speed available to very heavy users during peak time.

... and they explicitly mention P2P:

we restrict P2P speeds if it's having a negative impact on the online experience of the majority of our customers. We normally place restrictions in the evenings at peak time, but we do apply them during the day if a lot of customers are using P2P at the same time.

...

we are not stopping you from using any P2P service. P2P will just be slowed down in the evenings and during the day if a lot of customers are using it.

You might not have looked hard enough to find this, but that doesn't make it a denial.

My BT Broadband connection gives me about 6.5MB/s for non-P2P traffic, but that's because I'm only about 1/4 mile from the exchange.

P2P is slower than dial-up in the evenings, but is generally fast enough between midnight and 8am, and even to late morning on Saturday/Sunday, so I just schedule my big BT downloads to run overnight.

Re:Fast enough...

[ubercam]

Well they might move to another provider, but still be in the same sinking boat.

Take my girlfriend's house as an example. They used to have BT DSL which topped out at a whopping 1.5mbps (on good days). They have since moved over to Tiscali for various reasons and see about the same speeds. Tiscali sells their particular package up to 8mbps, but they will likely never see speeds like that.

Apparently the problem is with the exchange, but may also be the last mile of copper, who knows? It's highly unlikely it will ever be fixed, so they just have to deal with it. It all works fine for them because they aren't power users (web, email, occasional iPlayer), but it would still be nice to get what you paid for. They could be paying for 24mbit but wouldn't likely see more than 2mbit. I'm sure her area isn't unique in the UK.

Re:Fast enough...

[Bert64]

Or you can find a smaller provider who will sell a "slower" service for less money and possibly provide more ancillary services or better support etc.
Why pay for an up to 8mb service when your line can only handle 1.5Mb? go for a cheaper 2Mb service.

Also, Tiscali and BT consumer are two of the worst ISPs you could have picked, they are both mass market isps catering to the lowest common denominator. These ISPs will try to pack as many customers onto the smallest connection they can, safe in the knowledge that for every customer they lose there's 10 more who aren't clued up enough to notice. Tiscali for instance, may have 50 "up to 8mb" users connected to a single exchange, which has a 2mb backhaul connection...

Have a look at beunlimited (now o2) or some of the smaller but more highly rated isps on adslguide.org.uk, and avoid the big mass market ones like the plague, they are the mcdonalds of the isp world.