broadband advertising

ablelocks

from the Irish Times - great news.

BROADBAND OPERATORS will have to significantly alter their promotional material from the beginning of next month to more accurately reflect the actual download speeds available to subscribers, The Irish Times has learned.

At present, many broadband providers use their advertising to stress the maximum connection speed available through their service and only include the phrase "up to" in a font which, critics say, is all too easy to miss.

The new code will take effect on April 7th, after which operators advertising maximum speeds will also have to tell potential customers the average broadband speed attained by their service during "the busiest hour" of the week, averaged over the previous quarter.

The move will have a significant impact on the mobile broadband providers. Vodafone, 02 and 3 all claim to offer ínternet connection speeds of "up to" 3.4Mb per second (Mbps). At this speed, users could download an album from iTunes in less than 10 minutes. However, speeds never come close to this magic number and sometimes struggle to reach a third of it.

While it is impossible to say what the advertised speeds will fall to once the new code comes into force, industry sources estimate during the busiest hour of the busiest day of the week it will be closer to 800 kilobytes per second - less than one-quarter that currently advertised.

The assistant chief executive of the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland, Orla Twomey, said it had received "quite a number of complaints in relation to broadband speed".

and presumably quite a number of those complaints came from boards.ie members.

I rarely saw speeds greater than 800kbps at off-peak times with 3 Broadband, and at peak times it struggled to beat dial-up speeds, so it'll be interesting to see how 3 big-up their "service" now. feckers still owe me 80 euro.

foggy_lad

to be fair to most providers they advertise say 3mbps and will usually deliver around that and usually a bit more off-peak unless you are on the edge of their coverage area/far from exchange/old lines etc, and during peak hours they can offer at least one third the advertised speed most of the time.

it is only unscrupulous providers that hide behind the wording of their advertisements.

if i pay for 3mbps i should be getting that speed at off-peak times and at least 1mbps at the busiest times but what the ASAI are saying is they can continue giving poor speeds but they must advertise this by giving peak-hour speed averaged over the last quarter, how long will it take the unscrupulous providers to find a loophole in this??

this is a massive step in the right direction though so Well Done to the ASAI

delop

If you buy a 3 Mb service thats advertised as 'up to' 3Mb Speed, and your bill is €40 a month, can you pay 'up to' €40 a month

I think not!! I know my attitude is a bit childish but it does annoy me at times that its always the guy at the bottom of the food chain that pays full whack and just has to accept poor service/breakdowns

smellslikeshoes

Its good news but honestly ITS ABOUT ****ING TIME. Companies like 3 have been getting away with advertising up to 3.6meg when people are rarely getting anywhere near that.

Firetrap

I can still see ISPs being able to wiggle their way out of this one. There's no provision saying where they are to measure the speeds at peak times. All they have to do is measure them in an area where optimum conditions apply (take a look at the paragraph below - I've pasted in some text from the findings of the ASAI after I made a complaint about 3 "Broadband").


The advertisers provided information on what the optimum conditions would be in
order to achieve the maximum speed. These were low numbers of users in cell, high
signal strength (typically>70dBm), Low interference within the cell and from
surrounding cells (this was measured using a Ec/lo ratio which is a measure for the
users’ information at a particular frequency relative to all information at that
frequency. A perfect Ec/lo ratio was 0db with realistic good values at -3db to -6db; at
these values users could expect to get 2.7Mbps).
The advertisers said that while they (and their competitors in the market) can not
measure individual user experience. They said that they carried out speed tests from
which they could see that speeds of 2.7Mbps were regularly achieved. They also
explained that a user who was web browsing or checking email would see no
substantive difference between 1Mbps and 3.6Mbps.

watty

There is a MASSIVE difference between true fixed broadband products (DSL, Cable, Fibre, Metro Wireless or regular fixed Wireless) and MOBILE or NOMADIC products (IBB Ripwave, 3G/HSDPA/EDGE from Mobile phone companies, Digiweb Mobile and Clearwire).

A level playing field, properly described will benefit consumers and those operators with the better real life speeds.

watty

Firetrap wrote: »

These were low numbers of users in cell, high
signal strength (typically>70dBm), Low interference within the cell and from
surrounding cells (this was measured using a Ec/lo ratio which is a measure for the
users’ information at a particular frequency relative to all information at that
frequency. A perfect Ec/lo ratio was 0db with realistic good values at -3db to -6db; at
these values users could expect to get 2.7Mbps).
The advertisers said that while they (and their competitors in the market) can not
measure individual user experience. They said that they carried out speed tests from
which they could see that speeds of 2.7Mbps were regularly achieved. They also
explained that a user who was web browsing or checking email would see no
substantive difference between 1Mbps and 3.6Mbps.[/I]

Low number of users = 1 users in a sector = 3 to 6 in a cell
Perfect conditions. They should never have accepted that reply, it's totally unrepresentative.

I'd agree on last point and go further... web browsing without video on sensibly designed sites and email you won't really much notice difference between 300k & 3.6M. Except if latency is very poor (> 500ms) a web page with a lot of linked content will be x4 slower at 300k than same page loading with 50ms decent latency.