According to research by moneysupermarket.com, 44 per cent of British Broadband users are getting half the speed they pay for. In order to attract customers, the likes of Sky are offering speeds of ‘up to 16 Mbit/s’. The survey found that a mere 6% actually get anything near that.

It seems the slower the rating the better chance you have of getting what you pay for. There are many online Speed Tests, one we highly recommend is SpeedTest.org

Connection throttling

BT has been deliberately throttling back its connection, as one loyal customer reports:

“I have two ADSL lines on different phone lines one is BT, the other is Virgin.net both are 8 Mbit/s lines and have been working happily at about 7.5 Mbit/s for months if not years,”

But after a change to BT’s software, his lines fell initially to around 0.4 Mbit/s. After a lot of complaining, it’s gone back up to 0.9 Mbit/s.

A document on BT Yahoo’s page appears to confirm that changes to speed rating are afoot. Some of the advice for increasing your throughput speeds is completely out there!

If this situation continues, there’s going to be even more complaints to the advertising standards authority but will anything actually get done about it?

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