Huge growth, slow speeds

On a global grand scale, the broadband fortunes of China and Germany couldn’t be more polarised.

While China Telecom adds a further 810,000 broadband subscribers in one month alone (Sky sees an average increase of 200,000 broadband subscribers per quarter), it’s been revealed German citizens are struggling to get any kind of service at all.

820,000 Bavarian households are unable to access the national broadband network, leaving around 4% of the German population with zero broadband options in the home. Indeed, according to Bitkom, only 14 in every 100 German households utilises a broadband connection.

This inertia demonstrated by German broadband users is widely blamed on the nation’s satisfaction with ISDN dial-up!

Vorsprung durch technik? Nein danke.

The Chinese telecoms take-up statistics on the other hand are startling.

The merging of China’s leading telecoms companies, China Unicom and China Netcom, has resulted in a company that boasts 259 million subscribers (128 million GSM, 109 million fixed line and 23.36 million broadband).

China Mobile, another leading telecoms company, has 430 million existing subscribers, and is estimated to be adding seven million new users on a monthly basis.

However, with current home broadband speeds in China reaching a ceiling of 2Mbps, the country would need an increase in bandwidth before these companies can offer such facilities as HD video, online gaming and flawless VoIP and IPTV services.

 Get the Message?

First up, I’ve been on annual leave for the last working week, so forgive me for not posting in a while.

On my return, I’m happy to see the inaugural email in our monthly ‘Speed Demon’ series is currently winging its way to you. Contained therein you will find details of the latest broadband deals, expert advice from our resident boffin Michael Phillips and also a contribution from yours truly. Most pertinently however, you will see our shiny new broadband speed league table.

Fashioned from 3 months worth of data (with over 3000 readings taken for each supplier), this is a definitive account of speeds delivered by all the major ISPs during spring/summer 2008.

The verdict? Absolute rubbish.

I won’t start naming and shaming individual ISPs because there really is no need, they’re all underperforming.

Taking into account the range of connection speeds on offer (from 1Mbps to 24Mbps), you would expect the span between the fastest and slowest ISPs to be equally as wide, no? There is just 3.5Mbps between the top and bottom ISPs though, and you could pretty much throw a blanket over all 13 ISPs in the table given how close they are in terms of performance.

To me, this is incredulous. With certain ISPs advertising their service as ‘superfast broadband’, how can being one or two Mbps faster (on average) than a ‘standard’ broadband service be classified as ‘superfast’? 20Mbps faster and I’d happily let you use that ‘superfast’ tag, but one or two? Don’t make me laugh.

Also, the fact remains that even the well placed ISPs (Be Broadband at 5.77Mbps and O2 Broadband at 4.86Mbps) are woefully underachieving. You do know that broadband users in Japan and South Korea get average speeds of 55-70Mbps right? Clearly, when ‘up to’ 100Mbps arrives, it will actually mean 7Mbps.

Take Be Broadband out of the equation and the span between the remaining 12 ISPs is just 2.5Mbps. What’s the point in having league tables if each ISP is delivering pretty much the same speed? It doesn’t tell you anything.

Any consumers who focus on speed when evaluating which ISP to sign up with are foolish, it’s something I’ve said before and I’ll doubtless say it again. Look beyond speeds and hone in on data charges, headline costs, customer service phone line costs, hidden hardware charges, hardware compatibility and perhaps even the attitude of sales staff in stores.

Don’t get too caught up in the speed issue, there’s very little to choose between all 13 ISPs in our league table.

 Speed Testers - a rollercoaster ride

Call me lonely, call me an ‘enthusiast’, call me what you like (within reason), but I’ve spent the lion’s share of this morning investigating and evaluating broadband speed testers.

Between 11 and 11:15 AM today, I tested my broadband download speed across 10 different online speed testers. They were all very simple to use, and each captured a reading of my download speed (and in some cases, upload speed) there and then in that moment.

While I ran the speed testers I had no other applications open.

The results were as follows:

As you can see, the range of readings is startling!

In order for this to be a worthy, empirical test, I’d have to isolate each speed tester tool, and take a reading every minute for fifteen minutes using just that tool (thus providing me with 15 separate readings across a quarter-hour period for each speed tester).

Have I got the time to do that? Not just yet, but you can bet your bottom dollar I’m working on it.

So, what are the conclusions I’ve drawn from the data above? Well:

• Taking all the speed test results at face value, and interpreting them in a sensible way as opposed to taking a strict mathematical approach, I seem to be receiving download speeds of around 8.5 Mbps on a weekday morning. Frankly, I’m quite pleased with that.

• Unless drop outs in the service I’m receiving were uncharacteristically severe this morning, some speed test tools are either (a) wildly inaccurate, or (b) designed to make me get infuriated with my ISP and want to switch.

I additionally took the BT speed test, the results of which haven’t been included here. The noteworthy aspect of this test was it informed me (quite categorically, in bold red letters) the maximum download speed my line is capable of is 6.5 Mbps.

Oh really? Try telling that to the broadband expert at Broadband Expert.

Of course, if you want to take an accurate and infallible set of readings, you should use a downloadable speed test tool such as the Broadband Choices speed tester , and monitor your service for at least a month.

For now though, why not flit around online yourself, and see if the range of readings you receive is as varied as mine?

 A BT technician yesterday….

Their words, not mine.

It would seem a certain leading communications provider has enlisted the help of a PR firm from 1998. But let’s not dwell on that. I’m hip to this street jive anyway.

So what does this exciting, youth oriented campaign entail exactly?

Is Tim Westwood going to invite himself over and transform your lousy dial-up connection into a chromed out, warp speed broadband line with one hearty ‘big dogs big dogs here comes another banger’?

No.

Is Xzibit likely to pop round, rifle through your bins, let you know (like a ghetto Gillian McKeith) you’re eating too many ready meals, then turn your PC monitor into a gold plated 72 inch plasma screen with additional taser guns?

Negative.

In actuality, BT plan to ‘pimp’ your broadband in the following way (no rappers or fake MCs involved):

“BT’s Home IT Support service has launched BT Broadband Accelerator, a £90 home visit service to help improve the performance of customers’ computers and speed up their broadband connection.”

Perhaps BT chose to lead with the phrase ‘pimp’ on their press release because it’s only pimps who can afford this service?

However, it gets better:

“Customers are refunded if a 0.5Mb improvement on speed is not achieved.”

That’s more like it. Should you pay for this service and not receive an improvement of 0.5Mb on your connection speed, the £90 fee will be winging its way back to you faster than a fully loaded Nissan Micra.

Let’s face it though, 0.5Mb shouldn’t be too demanding an ask of a trained technician, so it’s unlikely any subscribers to this service will ever see a refund.

I’m yet to read anything in the small print suggesting it will be Starsky and Hutch’s faithful informant Huggy Bear carrying out the repairs, but I’ve still a few pages to go, so I’ll let you know.

 Exmoor Technology

Figures published by the BBC this week have indicated a distinct discrepancy between the broadband speeds received by razor edged urbanites, and those received by our carrot crunching rural relations.

Swinging London’s hipsters and media moguls receive, on average, download speeds of 4460 Kbps. The country cousins in East Anglia are only getting 3090 Kbps at best.

Bottom of the pile is Northern Ireland, where average download speeds are a paltry 2258 Kbps. Wales fares little better at 2587 Kbps, and residents of the South West are getting only 2869 Kbps to fire up their broadband driven stoves and mangles.

So who deserves a speedier service the most, town or country?

I have split loyalties having been born a country boy but raised a city dweller. My heart says businesses and residential properties in the country have just as much claim to a superior broadband service as those in any given metropolis, but my head knows it makes sense to give a cluster of commerce in a large town priority.

Not wishing to contradict myself too much, but high profile industries that relocated to rural areas (Barclaycard in Northamptonshire, Amazon in Buckinghamshire, Abbey in West Yorkshire) must feel the effects of these slow speeds the most. If ever there was an argument for improving rural services, then this is it in my opinion.

The nucleus of progress is more often than not located in towns and cities though, London in particular. With all due respect to rural residents, it’s the instant access to entertainment and amenities (Chinese food at 4am, early previews of big films, 24 hour dry cleaning etc.) that draws people to London, and these people wouldn’t stand for anything less than top dollar top speed broadband services.

However, to paraphrase the Waitrose ad, everyone deserves good broadband.

  Tron’s Hair Extensions

I read this week the internet could soon be made obsolete due to a superfast alternative built by Cern, the particle physics centre who initially pioneered internet technology nearly twenty years ago.

The new network, know eerily as ‘The Grid’, runs at speeds of up to 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, and has been built with dedicated fibre-optic cables. Capabilities of The Grid include the power to transmit holographic images, and the capacity to allow instant communal gaming to groups of over 100,000 online gamers. That’s some round of Command and Conquer.

However, it was the following piece of information that really captured my attention:

‘The Grid will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.’

Impressive, very impressive.

I’ve just got one quick question: why the hell would you want to do that?

Granted, from 1964 to 1972 they were absolutely on top of their game, no question, ‘Exile on Main Street’ is a modern masterpiece. I’m even prepared to allow side one of ‘Goats Head Soup’ and two tracks from ‘Some Girls’ slip in.

But 80s and 90s Stones, are you insane? You would need a frontal lobotomy to appreciate that stuff, let alone a superfast internet network.

Why are we designing internet networks that can send 33 albums halfway around the world in seconds, when all you need is 6? Perhaps even just a sturdy Greatest Hits might do it? This statistic also pales into insignificance when I tell you it’s possible to download, burn, listen to, evaluate and discard the entire Kate Nash back catalogue in under a nanosecond.

My advice? Get yourself an i-pod that holds eight songs, and download ‘Master of Puppets’ by Metallica. It’s all you need. In previous years, you would have been able to download this album for free from Napster. Unfortunately, the Metallica drummer and co-founder, Lars Ulrich, elected to drag Napster through the federal courts and ultimately destroy them. Oh dear.

Rather than sending duff albums by flamboyantly dressed cadavers (and I’m back onto the Stones now) to Sepang, how could ‘The Grid’ be put to a more practical use?

Well, ironing out glitches in VoIP and IPTV would certainly be one great innovation, as would an increased capacity to run your home security system (CCTV and all) from your PC.

Looking further ahead, holographic video conferencing looks a distinct possibility, creating the illusion that every conference participant is present in the room at the same time. This feeling of physicality between disparate entities would significantly aid communication between businesses, and emphatically crystalise the saying ‘it’s a small world’.

The Grid will ultimately sound the death knell for desktop computing, with the majority of net users turning to online applications to store data. Landline phones (already under threat from the ‘dongle’) and mobile handsets could take a major hit too, with VoiP and social networking all set to replace them on a permanent basis.

Having been in development for seven years, this parallel network is now built, using fibre-optic cables that run from Cern to 11 nerve centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East and Europe. Testing begins this summer.

So, my question to you is this: In the light of iplayer, 4OD and other applications decimating our frail, existing broadband network, how would you use all this extra bandwidth if it was to be introduced tomorrow?

What could you do with 1000Mb?

Answers on a holographically generated e-card please.

  The ‘Adrian Chiles Effect’

Those of you up to speed with the latest superfast broadband happenings will be aware of two things:

(1)   The BBC’s iplayer service is an incredible tool, but it spanks your download limit into oblivion, particularly if you’re on a starter or low-user package. Even those with an ‘unlimited download’ agreement aren’t safe. ISPs have reported a significant increase in traffic and capacity problems since the iplayer was launched.

(2)   Despite an unremitting campaign by Tiscali to have the BBC make a financial contribution to help upgrade the UK’s creaking and overloaded broadband networks, Ofcom has ruled the BBC should not be held financially liable for this.

Well, you can hear the sigh of relief at Broadcasting House from here (although I will confess to being sat in an office less than a mile from Broadcasting House. If anyone living in Arbroath heard the sigh then leave a comment underneath. It’ll give the piece more resonance).

Last time I checked, my TV license (yes, you guessed it, I’m going down that road) cost £139.50. Apparently, you can still get black and white TV licenses for only £47, but who (outside of Leicestershire) owns a black and white TV these days? So those of us with a colour set are paying 38p a day for the following:

•  My Family – As funny as having all your vital organs removed and sold on e-bay by rogue Lithuanian surgeons.

• Adrian Chiles – All of a sudden, drawing on your eyeball with a rusty needle doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

• BBC News – So far behind they’re still reporting on the Cuban missile crisis.

• Jools Holland – Try playing another note for heaven’s sake.

• Neighbours – Nope, that’s gone to Five.

Turnover generated by the BBC through TV license fees rose to £3.1 billion last year; upgrading the broadband network would cost in the region of £830 million. Wouldn’t you prefer to see your license fee pumped into a project that will vastly improve every facet of your broadband connection, rather than criminally unfunny sitcoms? Although unintentional, there’s no denying the advent of iplayer has strained the broadband network, to the extent that non-iplayer users are experiencing knock-on effects such as speed caps and overstretched customer service centres.

Potential solutions include a content-led exclusivity tariff, where ISPs do deals with content providers to ensure their products run more smoothly across that particular ISP’s network. Hence you could see Orange sign a deal with the BBC, and as a result iplayer would run glitch free using minimal bandwidth on Orange only, with the other ISPs having to settle for standard, bulky iplayer traffic.

In terms of trying to persuade the BBC to chip in, was the wrong ISP doing the chasing? Perusing the list of customer reviews on Broadband Choices, it becomes apparent Tiscali haven’t quite had their house in order since traffic shaping problems and LLU mishaps blighted their service earlier this year. Perhaps Virgin Media, with their Samuel L. Jackson fronted ghetto mentality, would have been better placed to storm Broadcasting House and ‘wup some corporation ass’ (or some such other generic action movie colloquialism)?

So, who’s accountable for upgrading the broadband network to the point that it can cope with iplayer-style applications?

Is it the responsibility of the ISP to get busy, the content provider to box clever, or the consumer to download sensibly?

Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s over to you.

  ‘We’re here to liberate your wireless router’

The common vigilante has, historically, been associated with an assortment of activities, ranging from reducing street crime and helping the elderly cross the road, to overthrowing governments, liberating suppressed communities and forming independent states.

However, a new, sophisticated breed of online vigilante is emerging, and if I told you that they reside on such sites as orangeproblems.co.uk and talktalkhell.wordpress.com, you might get an immediate feel for what I’m trying to describe.

The dawn of the ISP vigilante is among us, and these guys make the Cuban neighbourhood militias look like your local cub pack.

Having visited these sites myself, I was taken aback not only by the extreme, terrifying and contemptuous wrath some consumers reserve for their ISPs, but also the depth of information included therein.

As a one-stop remedy shop for all your ISP glitches, you need not look any further. Therefore, if you’re having no luck whatsoever with your ISP’s standard customer helpline, why not venture into a dedicated forum and see if you can find the solution to your problem there? The TalkTalkHell site gives ample information regarding difficulties with e-mail services, USB issues and DNS problems. They’ll also furnish you with direct phone numbers that allow you to bypass the usual human barriers in call centres.

Another added incentive, of course, is the opportunity these sites afford you to bitch, gripe and moan about your ISP while, at the same time, learning how to fix that problem router. Let’s not underestimate the ‘eureka’ factor either, when you realise there are another 75 people (in the south Loughbrough region alone) experiencing exactly the same problems as you.

I love a good moan, who doesn’t? Make mention to Andriy Shevchenko at the wrong time of day and I’ll go on for hours (and possibly end up punching myself in the face). The Virgin Media vigilante blog (cablehell.com, naturally), dishes out some of the best slatings I’ve read for many a year, some of these people can really write.

There are right and wrong ways to enter into formal complaints procedures though, and we’ve discussed this issue on Broadband Choices many times. Perhaps vigilante sites work best as an area to vent your spleen and relieve some of the frustration before calling your ISP and lodging a complaint. As we all know, screaming down the phone will get you nowhere.

Across all these sites, disgruntled users seem to have beef with three major issues, which arise time and time again:

(1)   Advertised speeds not matching their own received speeds

(2)   Customer Services offering inaccurate and unhelpful information

(3)   The current hot topic, fair usage policies and the cost of downloading beyond your allotted amount.

For those wishing to sock it to the man, take a step into this world. You never know, you just might make a difference.

If a more sanguine, mild-mannered rant is your bag, then get yourself over to the Broadband Choices reviews area.