British ISPs Favour Well-Connected Customers

scurtis writes "An insider has told eWEEK Europe that some Internet service providers in the UK only sign-up customers who can be guaranteed a good service, in order to improve average speed claims. The revelation comes after the regulator Ofcom criticised broadband service providers earlier this week for not delivering the speeds promised to consumers. Meanwhile, TalkTalk's chairman Charles Dunstone has argued that Ofcom could be doing a lot more to push BT — as the operator of the copper infrastructure — to improve maintenance of the lines and its communication with fellow service providers."

Comments

Well, Virgin signed me up...

[HopefulIntern]

...to their sub-1mbps service. So kudos to them, I guess..

Re:Well, Virgin signed me up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, the summary seems to complain about ISPs not being able to deliver promised speeds while at the same time complaining that ISPs try to avoid selling their services to people in areas where they can't meet their promised speeds. I realize that yes, in an ideal world everyone would have 10GB fiber run to their door, but that's simply not the case.

Re:Well, Virgin signed me up...

[HopefulIntern]

My relationship with Virgin is love/hate.

House 1: I was on their fibre network, had the 20mb package, everything went as it should, always had between 16-20 down speed. Line attenuation was acceptable, usually under 70ms ping. Customer support, when needed, was wank. Truly awful.

House 2: Again, on their fibre network, but in a "high-density area" (they just let wayyy too many people on for the network to handle). Still got the full 20mb, but line attenuation was awful. Unless I wanted to stay up til 2am, my pings were 300-1000ms to any given server. This meant the line was fine for downloading stuff, but the speed was not reflected in my browsing (pages load faster on my current 1mbps line) and gaming...forget it. I would wake up early before work and get an hour in before it went to shit. Calling to complain about this, all they could say was "Are you getting your 20 meg?" I was, so they just said "We don't support [upload/ping/jitter/any other problem you might encounter]". Arguing with them for 5 months we finally managed to get a 50% discount since the product did not do what it was advertised to do (the 20meg line specifically says "perfect for gaming").

House 3: Checked their postcode checker before moving in, and yes fibre net was available. Get there, having already signed the contract (we did it in a bit of a hurry since we were running out of time to find a new place) and find the fibre actually stops 3 houses down. They only laid the cables halfway down my street. Virgin won't put in more cable unless it's less than 4 metres because it isnt economically viable for them... So I say fine, I will try your ADSL service. I get to speak to an engineer, who asks me my internet habits etc. to establish what package would be best. I tell him I want the biggest, XL, because I don't want capped downloads. The speed of the package is 20 meg but I stop him and ask him for a no-BS assessment, how fast is the typical speed gonna be. He says typically around 8mb. I say fine, that will do, you got a deal. To this day I have never seen it go above 1mbps in any speed test.
The one redeeming thing is that I now have personal phone numbers for both an engineer and a sales person, who both live locally, to help me out without going through BS call centres.
Like I said, it is love/hate. But mostly hate.

Re:Well, Virgin signed me up...

[commodore64_love]

Is this "Virgin" the same company that provides cellphone service, aka Virgin Mobile?

I love that they let you buy just the service you need - in my case that's $5 a month worth of calls. They also sell data bundles for cheap (1 GB for $5). All the other companies require you get $30 minimum even if you rarely use your phone.

Re:Well, Virgin signed me up...

[jimicus]

Not quite as simple as that. Branson licenses the Virgin name and companies operating under the name tend to run fairly independently of one another.

In the UK, there used to be two cable companies which merged, bought Virgin Mobile and with it the rights to use the Virgin brand across their entire business. AFAIK, the relationship between other Virgin companies (including other companies in similar industries but in different parts of the world) may be minimal.

It's not just the quality of the lines

[crimperman]

It's also the routing. I once had a case where two adjacent sockets (on different lines) got entirely different speeds. Turned out one went direct across the road to the exchange and the other took a left out the building, went round the block for about 4 miles and came back to the Exchange across the road.

tiered pricing based on service possibility

[SkunkPussy]

I don't see why ISPs don't just measure the possible speed to your location, then put you in the highest price-band tarriff that your connection will allow.

So as an example if you sign up for 20 Mbps at £10.99 but your connection only allows 14Mbps, you get the 12-16Mbps tarriff at 9.49 or whatever.

Re:tiered pricing based on service possibility

[HotBBQ]

Holy guacamole! You can get 20Mbps for $17 USD? Shit, I pay $50 USD for 15Mbps. The US of A really sucks when it comes to telecommunications.

Re:Eh?

[Ephemeriis]

Do we REALLY want them to sell broadband to anyone even if they know the service will be shit? As far as I can see, this isn't the crux of the matter and I think Slashdot could be doing a lot more to improve the quality of their editing.

I dunno...

If they know I'm not going to get anything better than 1 Mbps, I sure as hell don't want to be paying for a 5 Mbps connection.

But, at the same time, I don't want them telling me no, sorry, your lines aren't good enough for our service and I wind up stuck with dial-up.

I guess what I'd like to see is universal availability, with an attempt to match the pricing to the performance you're actually going to get. Which sounds like I'm asking for an awful lot, but I'm not. If they'd drop the pretense of an "unlimited" package and just be honest with folks - you get 2 GB a month, over that you're paying $X/byte - then the pricing would kind of work itself out. Folks with crappy lines that can't download too fast would be unlikely to exceed that monthly allotment. Folks with blazing fast connections that like to download everything they can find would pay more, since they're downloading more. Nobody would really have to do extensive line testing or modify fees or anything.

We do it to

[Charliemopps]

US telcos do it to. Although I don't think it's to increase average speed claims. Customers that are too far out to get 1meg service usually have so much noise on the line that they generate a lot of repair calls. If you're getting under 1mb DSL you're also probably going to get dropped service every time there's a storm as well.

Re:We do it to

[drinkypoo]

US telcos do it to. Although I don't think it's to increase average speed claims. Customers that are too far out to get 1meg service usually have so much noise on the line that they generate a lot of repair calls. If you're getting under 1mb DSL you're also probably going to get dropped service every time there's a storm as well.

I don't know if it's still happening but telcos were being slammed hard for DSL failures so they reduced the range to which they will sell. Pacbell (well, now it's AT&T, but I think they made the change so long ago they were still pac bell) moved from selling to 14,000 feet to selling to 10,000 feet.

Re:Eh?

[Yamata no Orochi]

Except there's no reason to charge more for more downloaded, because it doesn't cost more to provide it. What costs more money is additional bandwidth, which is entirely different from $X/byte. It's more like $X/byte per second.

That's why caps are horseshit.

Re:Eh?

[KlaymenDK]

I live at the end of 5km of old copper, where the fastest ADSL speed seems to be about 600k. The smallest package I can get, however, is for 1mbit. It's not all that thrilling for a geek. :(

Would I rather have no connection? Err, no. Slow is fine, relatively speaking.

Re:Eh?

[cappp]

BBC ran a story on that a couple of days ago actually - the summary above links to a different article which doesn't lay out the facts quite as cleanly.

Its analysis of broadband speeds in the UK shows that, for some services, 97% of consumers do not get the advertised speed."The gap between the average headline speed and actual speed has increased in this period even though the actual speed has risen," he said.
In 2009, he said, when actual speeds for broadband were 4.1mbps, the average that those services were being advertised for stood at 7.1Mbps. In 2010, when people are generally getting 5.2Mbps out of their broadband, ISPs are claiming they will support speeds up to 11.5Mbps

For example, the survey found that on DSL services advertised as being "up to" 20Mbps, only 2% of customers got speeds in the range of 14-20Mbps. Of the others, 32% were getting a 8-14Mbps service and 65%, 8Mbps or less.

. Check out the BBC write-up - there's a great graph there which really drives the point home.

Article lacks credibility

[petes_PoV]

The reference to ISPs cherry picking customers comes from a single unnamed "insider". No information is provided to substantiate the claim and no ISPs were named, to allow for follow-up investigations.

So, ask yourself: in the dog-eat-dog world of extremely price sensitive internet provision, is it likely that some ISPs have so many potential customers queuing to sign up (with them) that they can afford to turn away those who may not get a good service?