Topic: Broadband [General]

2008 which has been based on research conducted by YouGov and covers the top 10 ISP brands.

The survey was conducted online through out of the UK, but excluded Northern Ireland during January and February of this year and queried around 4,000 broadband users with at least 3,000 responding to each questions.

PlusNet came out top overall having top marks for five of the six categories

1 - PlusNet - (www.plus.net)
2 - Sky Broadband - (www.sky.com)
3 - Pipex - (www.pipex.co.uk)
4 - Tiscali- (www.tiscali.co.uk)
5 - Virgin Media - (www.virginmedia.com)
6 - AOL Broadband - (www.aolbroadband.co.uk)
=7 - BT Broadband - (www.bt.com)
=7 - TalkTalk - (www.talktalk.co.uk)
=7 - Tesco Broadband - (www.tesco.net)
10 - Orange - (www.orange.co.uk)

The Quality & reliability of your home Internet Service

Winners - (very satisfied / fairly satisfied)
PlusNet - 88.3%
Pipex - 87.9%
Virgin Media - 83.0%
Sky Broadband - 81.0%

Losers - (fairly unsatisfied / not at all satisfied)
Tesco - 23.8%
Orange - 14.2%
TalkTalk - 13.9%
AOL Broadband - 12.8%

Download times of files and web pages

Winners - (very satisfied / fairly satisfied)
PlusNet - 82.9%
Pipex - 74.6%
Virgin Media - 71.1%
Sky Broadband - 69.4%

Losers - (fairly unsatisfied / not at all satisfied)
Tesco - 36.5%
Orange - 21.2%
TalkTalk - 19.5%
BT Broadband - 19.1%

The clarity of pricing & billing

Winners - (very satisfied / fairly satisfied)
Sky Broadband - 77.1%
Tiscali - 75.3%
PlusNet - 74.7%
Orange - 73.2%

Losers - (fairly unsatisfied / not at all satisfied)
Pipex - 16.7%
BT Broadband - 16.1%
Virgin Media - 11.3%
TalkTalk - 9.2%

After sales support

Winners - (very satisfied / fairly satisfied)
PlusNet - 73.9%
Pipex - 66.1%
AOL Broadband - 54.0%
Sky Broadband - 53.4%

Losers - (fairly unsatisfied / not at all satisfied)
Orange - 28.8%
TalkTalk - 27.9%
Virgin Media - 24.4%
BT Broadband - 23.8%

Good value for money

Winners - (very satisfied / fairly satisfied)
PlusNet - 81.1%
Sky Broadband - 75.7%
TalkTalk - 73.7%
Tiscali - 62.4%

Losers - (fairly unsatisfied / not at all satisfied)
BT Broadband - 28.7%
AOL Broadband - 18.4%
Virgin Media -16.5%
Orange - 16.0%

Speed of service activation (after sign-up)

Winners - (very satisfied / fairly satisfied)
PlusNet - 73.6%
Pipex - 67.7%
Sky Broadband - 66.8%
Virgin Media - 62.6%

Losers - (fairly unsatisfied / not at all satisfied)
TalkTalk - 25.4%
BT Broadband -18.6%
Sky Broadband - 17.0%
Tiscali - 16.2%

According to comparison site uSwitch.com a whopping 54 per cent of broadband customers failed to receive their MAC code on the first request.

Even though it has been a year since Migration Access Codes (MAC) were made mandatory by Ofcom so that broadband consumers could switch seamlessly between one broadband provider and another.

While the more than half of customers said they received their MAC code within a week of applying, nearly 21 per cent had to wait two weeks and nearly 15 per cent had to wait more than a month. This is worrying as a MAC only lasts 30 days so depending on the actual release date customers could find their time left to find a new provider seriously reduced.

While complains to Ofcom over MAC codes have fallen from 825 in March last year to 517 in January 2008, research by BroadbandChoices.co.uk show that fifteen per cent had to make two requests for their MAC codes while over sever percent had to ask more than six times.

The picture with local loop unbundling (LLU) doesn't look to rosy either, while 34.5 per cent said that they experienced no downtime a fifth said thay had to wait a more than a month to be reconnected.onnected again.

One third of consumers wishing to switch broadband provider don’t do so because they have no faith in the process according  latest research from BroadbandChoices.co.uk .

The poll, which mirrored previous studies, was carried out to mark the first anniversary of a mandatory Migration Authorisation Code (MAC) which was introduced by Ofcom to make switching providers easier.

In 2007 the figures for consumers switching broadband provider rose, to 13 percent (up from nine percent in 2006). Current statistics show that one in four consumers is looking to switch broadband provider in 2008. But whereas 300,000 consumers switch energy supplier every month with ease, broadband switching has only 154,917 switching per month.

We are still paying too much for our broadband according to uSwitch.com, even though prices are lower than ever.

It found that the price we pay is 36 percent lower than four year ago, even though speeds have increased. In 2004 the average price for a 512Kbps connection was £27 per month, not an (up to) 8Mbps line costs on average only £17 per month.
The company say that even so nearly 5 million households are paying over £20 per month, now while they point out that this is effectively 'wasting' £162m a year, there is more to deciding on an ISP than just the price. This is why many of the satisfaction survey on ISPs usually see the lower priced providers come a lot lower than the average.

The UK broadband minister, Stephen Timms has been moved on to the Department of Work and Pensions.

He will be replaced by Baroness Shriti Vadera who will take over his role immediately. Mr Timms has been quite active in meeting those within the industry as the UK tries not to fall behind in race to provide the next gereration of high speed networks.

Neil Berkett, acting CEO of  Virgin Media said the government's current "hands-off" approach to regulating investment in broadband was the right one and warned that interfering would only hamper the industry, "Regulation is neither necessary nor recommended. It would disincentivise companies from investing in networks,"

It's not just Sky who have problems with their routers, it seems that there could be a whole load more trouble for the rest of us.

The problem occurs with the ever favourite security concern, the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) feature built into most if not all newer routers, this allows the router to be modified by a service so that running games, instant messaging programs and other applications will work seamlessly without any user configuration.

If a user visits a website which has a malicious Flash file and the host PC has a version of Flash later than v8 then due to a flaw in UPnP they can be remotely controlled and allow a redirect to any website. While this could be a nuisance for some, if for instance attackers redirect trusted sites such as banks or ebay, customers could be exposing their login credentials to the attackers.

If fact there are numerous uses an attacker could find a use for a hacked router, and whereas antivirus software can detect a PC which has been compromised, a router is a lot more complex to discover. Routers made by Linksys, Dlink and SpeedTouch have been confirmed to be at risk, but this could also include many others.

Most routers come with UPnP on as default, but researchers say that the only defence at the present is to turn it off again, something which may be quite daunting to the majority of non-technical broadband users.

The Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA) has said that it is forecasting healthy growth rates for Broadband next year.

The areas in which it thinks the major grow will occur are those of  IPTV, VoIP and video conferencing services, this in turn will force providers to upgrade their networks to provide faster, more reliable connections. The say this will in turn lead to further technological innovations on the content and applications side.

The ISPA quite rightly says that "Broadband has made possible web technologies such as streaming media, telephone over the internet, and the downloading and consuming of movies and music," but we wouldn't hold your breath for any major speed improvements in the next year.

BroadbandChoices.co.uk have commissioned a survey by ICM which revealed than which a lot of broadband users want to change, many are afraid to.

It showed that although 69 per cent of consumers said that they would change supplier if they were offered a cheaper package, and 51 per cent said they would do so if their new provider could offer faster connection speeds,  that many were loath to switch.

The main reason is that consumers were worried about getting into lengthy contracts and tied to a minimum term with their new provider, 43 per cent of those questioned cited this. 35 per cent thought that that they would get the same level of package or service with a new provider, and in true British spirit 29 per cent said that they just couldn't be bothered to switch!

It must have been too much pre-Xmas sherry, or a plan to get into the 'school of bleedin' obvious', but we have been told the reason for slow ADSL, according to Virgin Media.

At his eForum discussion the Minister of State for Competitiveness, Stephen Timms, was told by Virgin Media chief technical officer Howard Watson the problem was...copper!!

He also blamed it on the use in promotion of the words "up to" when relating to broadband speeds.

Scientists are also looking into whether it is the cause AIDS and smallpox as well......

Telecoms regulator Ofcom has released results from its latest International Communications Market report.

The publication analyses trends in the  global television, radio and telecommunications sectors last year worth £873bn , it found that more than half of all British households possessed a broadband connection at the end of last year.
It also showed that around 40% of households have already taken advantage of a bundled service, where broadband is included with another service such a as phone or internet.

A typical family household in the UK with two parents and two children, who use a basket of communications services that includes a landline, basic pay-TV and the internet, will pay £25 a month on a triple-pay deal; "This compares with £27.22 in France and £39.77 in Germany. The same family in the US will pay £69.54," stated Ofcom. It also highlighted that 68 per cent of UK broadband were satisfied with their broadband speed, even though the UK has one of the biggest gaps in perceived headline and actual speeds.

BT has come bottom of the eight major UK broadband providers in a customer-satisfaction survey, with Tiscali coming out best of the bunch.

The survey was compiled by JD Power and Associates on 1,683 UK broadband customers in the '2007 UK Broadband Internet Service Provider Satisfaction Study'. They compared the big UK ISPs rating them on a maximum of 1,000 points. Points were given for account performance and reliability, customer service and technical support, cost, image, billing, email services and offerings and promotions.

Tiscali came out top with 668 points, while BT only managed 626 but it real terms is only 4 per cent so the difference between the main players. It also highlighted the average broadband subscription cost has fallen from £25.91 a month last year to £21.10 per month and  the average broadband speed has risen by 40 per cent to 4.87Mbps. Nearly 75 per cent of customers said that they also take other services from the company such as home telephone, cable/satellite TV or mobile phone.

With all the recent talk about faster broadband services the government should concentrate on making sure all can connect to the existing broadband network in the UK says analysts Ovum.

They claim that the benefits of faster fibre-based services don't justify the costs involved which are estimated to be in the region of £15bn, what they would rather see was closing the 'broadband divide' and get households that aren't connected to the existing broadband network in the UK online.

The facts fly in the face of the recent few years, where the 'build it and they will come approach' is exactly what happened with broadband services in the UK. Once the infrastructure was established then the users 'did come', with 9 out of 10 internet users using broadband services.
Or it could juts be that he is content with his 14.4k modem.....

Parents are still failing to monitor the websites their children visit, according to a new report from the moneysupermarket.com.

Their findings show that 46 per cent of parents don't check on the websites children are visiting, but on the plus side 21 per cent use some sort of filtering software such as Net Nanny, to control which websites their children can access. 34 per cent regularly check software security settings and 32 per cent have a sneaky look at their child's browser history, although net savvy kids can easily hide their tracks.

The main area of concern for parents are adult content sites, but they are increasingly worried about chartroom and social-networking websites.

The study also found that children aged three to 15 spend an average two and a half hours a week online, outside of school. This figure rises to four and a quarter hours for children aged 13 to 15. The study also shows that nearly a fifth, eighteen per cent, of children use a computer in their bedroom.

It's not really a great surprise but BT's next-generation 21CN broadband network isn't going to move the UK into the next level of high speed access.

To mirror this fact one of the UK's leading, although un-named, ISPs have said that it has worries about the national rollout planned for later this year, both on the technical side and actual implementation. It claims that BT isn't really sure on what is happening in it's own organisation.

BT say that although only a small number of ISPs have taken part in trials, any information is available to everyone and it's "was one of the biggest ever consultation projects" before things started to get rolling with the recent trails.

The ISP also has doubts on any claimed speed advantages of 21CN although BT have continued to say that it "is fair" to tout the service as an 'up to 24Mbps' connection it was up to Ofcom to tell it to do different, "If Ofcom wants to get people together and create an industry agreement on how to market broadband, we'll welcome it." it said.

Nearly nine out of ten internet connections in the UK are now made via broadband according to the latest  survey from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Broadband actually accounted for 88.4 per cent of all internet connections in September 2007, up from 86.2 per cent in June this year. Dial-up connections accounted for just 11.6 percent of the total. The total number of connections also rose 1.5 per cent between June and September, but all is not rosy.

As we have previously reported the actual speed of connections is somewhat different to those advertised, with 49.2 per cent having an actual advertised speed of more than 2Mbps. It's a piuty that the ONS didn't report the actual speed, but rather reported.

Which is stating the obvious!!

Well not quite cure sickness, but according NTL Telewest Business two-thirds of people said they would work from home when sick, rather than take the day off.

71 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds saying they would work from home when ill, but as people age increase their enthusiasm for work decreases, with 69 per cent of 35 to 44-year-olds saying they work, with this dropping to just 34 per cent of 55 to 64-year-olds.

So 'pulling a sicky' maybe a thing of the past,as your boss may want you to work if you suffer from anything less than a fatal illness.

Broadband providers didn't come out too well in a review of the number of complaints to Which! lawyers regarding poor service UK industries.

Top of the list was BT with the most complaints followed by Virgin Media, next comes a deviation as British Gas takes the third place. ISP's then take fourth, fifth and eighth places with Talk Talk, Orange and Tiscali taking these respectively.

The main area of complaints were installation problems and general customer service issues, but overall the telecoms industry fared badly.

TopicPoint claim that a drop in the numbers of people signing up for broadband in the UK is putting the country's economic and social progress in jeopardy.

According to their estimates 470,000 households signed up to broadband between July and September this year, which compares with 510,000 between April and June. This could further exaggerate the 'digital divide' in the UK and have significant economic and social consequences fro those involved.

With a total of just under 15  million broadband users in the UK it's not surprising that the UK market has nearly reached saturation point.

Down under in Australian researcher has developed a technology that could potentially give speeds of  250Mbps broadband over copper wires.

Dr John Papandriopoulos from Melbourne University studied the problem of interference rather than by simply trying to push more data through copper. This is good news for many as mainly people get broadband via ancient copper originally designed for analogue phone services.

The bad news is that the algorithms he has developed will remain a secret until he has obtained a patent, and then he recons that it could be another three or four years before we could see it in use by ISPs. Although there is the potential for 250Mbps, Papandriopoulos is aiming for a mere 100Mbps to start with.

Broadband users who have a Linksys, Netgear  or many other routers may have to think before they call BT to report line dropouts.

Zen Internet has uncovered problem with the Texas Instruments AR7 chip which can cause the line to be come unstable and then drop, the problem is that around a third of broadband routers have this chip.
When a customer reports a line problem a BT engineers would test the line using Hardware by Speedtouch, which don't have the AR7 inside, and then as there is no fline fault the customer would have to stump up a £169 unnecessary call-out charge.

As a result Zen have told customers to check before buying broadband equipment and steer clear of AR7 based routers, they also noted not calling BT on a line problem "until alternative hardware - without the AR7 chipset - is tested."

The list of AR7 routers can be found here.

The UK broadband market is dominated by the 'big six' providers according to research by Topic Point.

During the second quarter of 2006 these six, which are BT, Virgin Media, Carphone Warehouse, Tiscali, Orange and Sky, accounted for 94 per cent of the home broadband market.
Virgin Media and Orange were the biggest losers among the big players, but it was the smaller ISPs, including Pipex, which really fared badly, losing a market share of two per cent between them for the same period.

It also noted that the total number of internet access households had reached saturation point, with the numbers growing "only slowly, if at all".

Unbundled (LLU) lines in the UK have been criticized as unreliable and being subject to too many faults according to a report.

The September report from the Office of the Telecoms Adjudicator (OFFTA) says that LLU lines suffer a failure rate of between 15 and 25 per cent which is an "unacceptably high level".
And the blame has been put on Openreach, which is the division of BT responsible for maintenance of LLU lines in their exchanges.

As we all know British broadband users have to put up with some of the slowest broadband speeds in Europe, but a recent report of 23 European countries puts us way back in 9th place.

The places the UK in a position lower than Poland, Slovakia and Hungary while nearly ten times slower than the leader Finland.
The research information was compiled by independent 'think tank' the Information Technology Innovation Foundation which also compared the cost of broadband with households in Finland paying £2.54 per month per Mbps for broadband compared with £5.50 in Britain.

While Ofcom thinks that the future of high speed broadband may not lie in fibre, in the short term those counties who have invested in fibre infrastructure are providing far faster connections to it's customers. How far has the UK got to fall behind until we start to see major investment in the UK?

The head of  BT's local network business, Openreach has called on the Ofcom to guarantee a return on any fibre-to-home investment.

Steve Robertson head of Openreach said that in order for the company to invest the huge sums of money in the next generation of networks they need to have confidence that they will have some payback.
The company also needs to have LLU operators, from TalkTalk and Tiscali to BT Retail and Sky, to agree what sort of networks they need and what services they are going to run.

As a result, Openreach needs the agreement of the regulator, the industry and government before next generation networks can really take off. Ofcom's consultation, to be launched next week, is likely to be dominated by this debate.

Parents are relying too heavily on their children doing as they are asked to keep them safe online according to new research from BroadbandChoices.co.uk.

The report shows that 84 per cent of parents polled across the UK said that they rate verbal agreement with their children on safe Internet usage as their number one means of monitoring online activity. This comes in the wake of a worrying Government report that one in four children has put themselves in potential danger by secretly meeting strangers they have contacted online.

Other ways that parents protect their children from online dangers are, the use of parental control software (63 per cent), restricting the amount of time children spend online (62 per cent) and  checking the computer to see what they have been doing online (59 per cent).

While this may seem like parents know what their children are doing, asking the children shows a different story. When asked what they did online during their school holidays 48 per cent said they downloaded music and photos, but 45 per cent said they joined in with chat rooms and tried making new friends online, with 40 per cent using social networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook.

The report also outlined the need for parents to educate children on the dangers of online contacts, and not to reveal personal details to those they only meet online.

SOS Broadband is offering a service to help surfers who are having technical difficulties to solve their problems over the phone rather than call up an ISPs help desk.

Based in Bromley in Kent, the company offers support from technicians who will talk you through a number of hardware and software checks, and will loan you equipment in an emergency. The service costs £6.99 a month and support is available around the clock, customers will also have access to a freephone number to contact technicians.

The area with the most internet connected households has been revealed by the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

Both London and the have South West has Sixty-nine per cent of homes on-line with the East of England (67%), South East (65%) and Scotland (60%) following close behind. London as you would expect has the greater concentration of  high-speed connections with six in ten connected via broadband.

Northern Ireland, the North East and Yorks & Humber are at the other end of the scale with only 52 per cent of households online, with over half saying that they didn't have the time go get on line and a fifth admitting the lack of computer knowledge was holding them back.

KCom, the recently re-branded Kingston Communications, has ran into a spot of bother as it has lost it's connection to BT.

The Hull is the only place in the UK which has an independent telco so a lack of connection to BT means that it is isolated from the rest of the UK serviced by BT.

Internet users in the Hull area will have to wait for BT to resolve the fault.

Recent figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) now show that 90 per cent of UK fixed internet connections now use broadband.

Broadband has seen significant growth since the ONS started  collecting internet data in 2000, but it wasn't until 2005 that they overtook dialup as the most common way of connecting to the internet, and while broadband growth peaked last year, the market is still growing at over six per cent per year.

According to the report 47 per cent of connection speeds are now faster than 2Mbps, an increase from 43 per cent in March 2007, also the percentage of connections with a speed of less than 2Mbps decreased to 52.8 per cent in June 2007, down from 56.8 per cent in March 2007 and 62.1 per cent in December 2006.

The full report is on the ONS website (pdf).

BT is getting bed press by a pocket of rural Wales who claim they have been left 'in the cold' with no broadband access.

While Wales has one of the highest accessibility rates for broadband not just in the UK, but the world, there are still some losers in the broadband revolution. Two Welsh towns, Dolfor and Llaithddu near Newtown, were promised broadband by BT but now it seems that this will not materialise as they claim it is uneconomic to run new cable to the exchange.

Businesses say that the lack of broadband is losing them money, and to make matters worse they have lost money promised them by the from the Welsh Assembly, who provided a grant for businesses to be connected via a satellite dish or a microwave connection. This money was withdrawn after BT promised they would provide a broadband connection, something denied by BT.

The net is about to become overloaded, yet again!

Analysts at Frost & Sullivan have warned that due to the high rate broadband growth networks are at "breaking point". This all sound very familiar to the 'warnings' which were sounded when broadband first started taking off in this country replacing dial-up connections.

What may fail to realise is that not only have the speeds of residential connections been raised, but those used by by backbone providers have also. BT for example have been spending vast sums of money on it's 21CN network and companies across the world are involved in similar upgrades.

The next 'worry' is that due to the lack of IP4 addresses the world will grind to a halt, or maybe Y3K...

A massive quarter of broadband customers are unhappy with the service they get from their ISP according to a large surver by uSwitch.

And it come as no surprise that the 'free' providers such as Orange and the Carphone Warehouse come in for the most criticism, and the worrying trend is that the shift is in the upward direction, dissatisfaction has risen 3 percent since the last survey in October last year.
The survey was conducted on 9,000 home-phone customers and 11,000 broadband users and found that 35 percent of Orange customers and 31 percent of TalkTalk broadband users were unhappy with the companies. To put this in perspective this equates, in Oranges case, to a massive 400,000 customers!

On the flip side BT came out top for technical support, but was considered worst value for money. Which possibly goes to prove the old adage "you get what you pay for, and theirs no such thing as a free lunch".

We British are paying up to 17 times more for our broadband compared to some European countries according to a study by the Money Supermarket.

The survey makes depressing reading as in terms of average speed we also rank badly, coming in in 16th place, well behind most of our European neighbours who have invested in a fibre infrastructure rather than relying on outdated copper lines.

The UK, on average, pays £5.60 a month for each megabit per second (Mbps) that we have available, leaving us in 12th place, a whopping 17 times higher than Sweden and seven times more than France.
Even countries who pay more for their broadband seem to have a better deal, Poland for example pays £6.60 a month per Mbps and receive on average 7.5Mbps, three times the 2.6Mbps in the UK.

These findings dispel the myth that while broadband isn't a quick here in the UK, it's cheap. But al least we don't live in Turkey!

According to a poll over 61 percent of UK broadband users say they couldn't live live in the slow (dial-up) lane anymore.

The study by Orange Broadband also show that nearly have of those questioned spend three or more hours a day online, it those in the south-west of the UK use their broadband for entertainment, while nearly a fifth of people in the north-west use their computer to watch their favourite TV programmes.

And when you think of what is on the telly these days his remarks don't seem so amazing!

Many of us overspend on our broadband in fear of upsetting ISP's by exceeding download limits.

BroadbandChoices.co.uk, the price-comparison website, has revealed that a survey of broadband users shows that over half of the people it questioned were paying for broadband services they don't need.
Most were worried that their service would be cut off or would be charged a premium so sign up for  packages that offer far more than required.

As with all things customers should try to check how much they are actually using before signing up to a service.

Aberdeenshire and Shetland are the first local authority areas in Britain to have more than half of their homes and businesses connected to ADSL according to figures released by BT.

At the top of the ADSL broadband take-up league table is Aberdeenshire with 50.9 percent and Shetland closely following with 50.7 percent, with Scottish areas taking the top 5 places and it's national average of 33.3 percent ahead of the UK average of 31.2 percent.

1. Aberdeenshire 50.9 percent
2. Shetland 50.7 percent
3. Stirling 48.4 percent
4. Aberdeen 48.3 percent
5. Moray 47.9 percent
6. Monmouthshire 47.5 percent
7. Oxfordshire 46.8 percent
8. (eq.) Scilly Isles, Flintshire 46.4 percent
10. Highland 45.8 percent

The fact that nine out of  ten of the places are either in Scotland and Wales maybe due to the fact that these 'rural' areas have finally discovered broadband, but we daren't state this for a fact!!

Thinkbroadband.com has some info on BT's changes to it's Broadband Remote Access Server (BRAS) profiles.

Connections on the IPStream Max products have at the present BT have sixteen profiles which determine the users data rate, but as f