A recent Press release from OFCOM has highlighted issues that consumers have with differences between speed expectations and those delivered.
As with anything sold, or bought, its praises are sung, whilst its flaws are avoided within a trades description framework. Nothing new there, but the reductions in delivered speeds over time should have had more emphasis than "speeds may vary", certainly where variation really means slowing down. Obviously OFCOM are getting complaints about this to the extent that they announced changes yesterday to allow cancelling contracts and changing ISP without penalty if you are not getting the expected speeds.
Not much of a solution if your supplier has only BTW available, is it.
Hopefully it will focus minds and emphasise the need for reliable and increasing speed over the network. I note that after an engineer reset, my connection can exceed 50mbps out here, in the sticks, and some way from the cabinet, but that soon slows as DLM takes over. DLM is very active throttling back, interleaving, etc. A couple of Power cuts are enough, and out here, two related power cuts are far from unknown, one to re-route for maintenance, another to restore or further re-route. Thus speed slows with DLM, but as for returning, that can take literally weeks it seems.
So if Suppliers are to be held to account for falling speeds, they will need to develop strategies that keep speeds up and reliable in the future. More cabinets maybe (in our village there are fewer spread out than in one street in the local town), line boosters, Vectoring, and what about revisiting DLM's settings?
Having got the Superfast system largely in place throughout the UK, the next step must be getting reliability and speeds up, I reckon. Now may be the time to start moving away from the copper phone system towards one better designed to suit broadband?
They very vague on what constitutes an acceptable speed too.
