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

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.

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.

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: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: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?