We received a petition asking:
“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Investigate ISP’s oversubscribing on their network and throttling broadband.”
Details of Petition:
“Internet providers are quite clearly oversubscribing on their networks and are resorting to throttling speeds to lower congestion. The problem is they are selling a product by speed and are not offering this speed at peak times (anywhere from 4pm to 1am) which means the service you are paying for is not the service you bought or was advertised. With todays broadband services, eg Games on Demand (up to 4gb per download), movies on demand (up to 2gb in size) and music on demand (anything up to 300mb per album) ISP’s have severely underestimated customers usage and rely on this underestimate to continue to oversubscribe their networks and keep the status quo. The problem now being is that the status quo is no longer maintained as we are now being throttled on speeds and blocking ports to restrict the speed we signed up for. The ISP’s are blaming pirates but as I have clearly shown this is not the case, it is normal useage for todays bandwidth hungry services and it is unacceptable that our service is being degraded and this needs to be investigated NOW and THOROUGHLY as the state of broadband in the UK is now suffering.”
Read the Government’s response
The capacity of an ISP’s network and the number of subscribers sharing that network can both contribute to reduce download speed for customers when compared to advertised broadband connection speeds.
However, there are a number of reasons why a subscriber may not receive the broadband connection speed advertised by ISPs. One main reason is that for most broadband customers the maximum speed available declines the further they are from the telephone exchange.
Provision of better information so that customers may choose and use broadband products and services effectively is an important consumer issue. Accurate and easy to understand information is essential for consumers.
Accordingly, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) has recently considered the issue of network oversubscription in more detail and has agreed a voluntary code of practice with leading ISPs which requires them to provide more information to their customers on how they apply fair usage policies and manage traffic on their networks. The code of practice also contains measures to give consumers a clearer understanding of the speeds they can actually get in practice. It is hoped that these measures will go some way in reducing the mis-alignment between advertised broadband speeds and those actually received by consumers.
To gain a clearer picture of the issue, Ofcom is also undertaking the UK’s most authoritative and comprehensive broadband speed survey to identify actual broadband performance across the country and its relationship to advertised headline speeds.
More information about the research and the code of practice can be found on the Ofcom website.
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