The truth about broadband

Posted on 20 Oct 2008 at 10:39

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Gallery

What if you need faster access than that? A few ISPs offer higher speeds using ADSL2+ technology, including Be, O2 and Sky. (There are more ISPs in this market, but not enough of their users responded to our survey to give us meaningful statistics; speeds such as 'up to 24Mbit' will get more common as time goes on.) O2's 16Mbit service averaged 9.92Mbit/sec for our readers, so those who'd chosen to pay for a nominal 100% speed increase compared to O2's 8Mbit tariff, which averaged a relatively high 5.68Mbit/sec, were only getting a 75% boost. Sky's 16Mbit option ran at an even less blistering 7.24Mbit/sec - barely faster than Be's '8Mbit' package.

We've said before in Computer Buyer that if you want seriously fast and reliable broadband, the first choice is cable. Only two companies have ever rolled out a fibre optic cable network across the UK and into users' homes; the two, NTL and Telewest, merged with each other and then, in 2006, with Virgin Mobile, creating Virgin Media, the only company offering mobile, landline, TV and cable broadband services.

It's important to distinguish between the ADSL tariffs offered by Virgin Media throughout the country, which work over the phone lines in exactly the same way as with any other ISP, and Virgin Media's cable services, which run over dedicated fibre optic connections in limited areas. It's the latter that we're concerned with here.

Virgin Media haven't done themselves many favours in this market, getting into a row with Sky that resulted in the loss of channels including Sky One to their TV subscribers, then vexing broadband users with customer service blunders and the quiet introduction of 'traffic management', which penalises heavy users of the supposedly unlimited service by slashing their download speed if they transfer too much data.

But in offering a 20Mbit service that averaged 11.78Mbit/sec for the users who responded to our survey, Virgin Media have set a target for ADSL services to aim at. Only Be's 24Mbit package approached this speed, averaging 11.16Mbit/sec, but Virgin is likely to leapfrog that by rolling out a 50Mbit upgrade by next year.

Unlike ADSL, Virgin's fibre optic network suffers virtually no line attenuation, so distance from a point of origin doesn't degrade the service. However, other factors do affect speed, including contention (the number of users effectively competing with each other for limited network bandwidth), which explains why not even cable can consistently deliver the quoted speed.

Choosing and abusing

Speed aside, there are a number of things to look for when choosing a broadband provider. Firstly, most impose some sort of limit on the amount of data you can download, and it's important to check that this will fit your needs, especially if you plan to take full advantage of high bandwidth services such as online music and movies.

The BBC's iPlayer service (www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer), for example, which makes selected programmes available to play back in your web browser, has caused considerable alarm among ISPs, because although the quality (and therefore the bandwidth required) is a far cry from HD movies, far more people are starting to use iPlayer on a regular basis.

To give you an idea, monthly download limits range from about 5GB to 50GB, and watching a show on iPlayer uses about 0.5Mbit/sec, about a gigabyte every four and a half hours. You can see it would be quite easy to hit the limit over a month if you got into an iPlayer habit. Swapping high resolution photos, downloading applications and updates, sending or receiving emails with large attachments, and backing up your PC to a remote server can also add up to a lot of gigabytes.