Are You Happy With Your Broadband? February 27, 2007
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Personally, I’m just happy to have any broadband, but a growing number of people are unhappy with their broadband service in the UK. Despite the avergae speed being a healthy 2MBps, ISPs are slipping up.
According to researchers, Point Topic, users are not as chirpy as they used to be. In just 10 months, user smiles are turning to frowns.
“The change since our last survey is striking. Within 10 months the satisfaction levels have declined significantly,” says Dr Katja Mueller, Research Director at Point Topic. “From 92% of respondents saying they were 'very' or 'fairly' satisfied in February 2006 with the service they receive overall, it has dropped to 77% in December 2006.”
Unsurprisingly, the quality of after sales service fell from just 7% being ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ unhappy with to 18.3% being not amused this time. Mueller says that many ISPS are more focused now on getting market share fast at the expense of good service.
Around 25% of those surveyed are ready to jump ship and get a new supplier in a situation where ‘churn’ looks likely to be 2007’s most noticeable broadband development.-Martin Lynch
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
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Comments
I Myself am happy with my isp, i was only on 2mbit until about 2 weeks ago im with bt broadband, it has been stable since the first day i got it, maybe more expensive than other isps, and recently got upped to 5mbit unlimited at no extra cost.
I am also with BT, and have been for years. Sure they cost more but they have been good to me and very stable.
I think the problem is that a lot of ISPs have been pretty unstable over the last year due to the increased competition to get more speed to consumer. Many of my friends and family have suffered from outages and general slugageness (not a real word but should be) of the internet. People are being sold the "up to 8mb broadband" and I have yet to meet anyone on a DSL line to get anywhere near that speed, at anytime of the day.
I'm quite happy with my speeds but I would be happier if I could see myself hitting 7mb instead of the max 4.5 I have reached so far.
I was with what was a very good isp but have left since their speed and stability went dire in December and has never recovered. They got into financial difficulty and reduced the capacity they were buying, chucked off a load of heavy users, introduced smaller caps and stopped having burst bandwidth available for peak times. Speed ground to a halt expect for in the middle of the night. They always blamed their suppliers but now I'm with an isp that has the same supplier yet not the same problems strangely enough.
I have 1Mbps broadband in my house, but I live right next to Goonhilly satellite station.
So all I need to do is walk into the Internet Cafe and I get access to 100Mbps of beautiful FREE internet :D
I have 2.9mb/s with Pipex Homecall, and i can say they are a waste of time for us 'gadgeteers', BT traffic is restricted to 20kb/s and there are periods of dial up speed, i mean, honestly, that is SO last century
I moved from pipex for being too slow recently. They also have traffic shaping which is annoying. I moved to NewNet who were great but really hiked the price of their top package so I am now with Names.co.uk on an 8Mb line and I get between 3.5 and 5Mb. Which is fine imo :)
UK ISPs are engaged in a race for the bottom. They're all in headlong pursuit of the lowest prices and highest speeds with no consideration of quality of service.
You can get faster lines for less money, but you can't do anything with them. Take Pipex. BitTorrent is permanently throttled to 20-30k/s, Usenet is throttled to unusability at about 5k/s, they even throttle YOUTUBE for God's sake.
They're desperate to attract customers, even if it means selling products at prices that mean people can't actually use them.
ISPs really need to upgrade their internal networks and their transatlantic connections to truly offer 8Mbps.
Demon claimed to be doing this before they would offer an 8Mb connection. That's why they were pretty much the last to offer ADSL Max.
I'm close enough to the exchange (about 100m) to get a line speed of over 7Mbps. On a good day, I can actually get over 700KB/s from Microsoft's download sites. I've seen BitTorrent go up to 200KB/s.
This comes at a price: I'm paying £24.99 per month for my service. This is the HomeOffice package, which has a static IP address, 20MB web space, and the option of dial-in access. Looking at it, I'm not sure what I'm paying the extra £5 for.