Toothless Ofcom: C'mon consumers, show your teeth on broadband speeds Consumers experiencing consistently shonky broadband speeds will have the power to walk away from their contracts, new Ofcom chief exec Sharon White will announce today. The body will publish a "beefed-up" Code of Practice on broadband speeds, White will announce in her inaugural speech to consumer body Which? White joined …
We 'have' the power to walk away from shonky contracts currently and it doesn't do us any good; there are enough ways for companies to ruin customers days (i.e. poor credit records) to provide a chilling effect.
I remember years ago I returned a broadband dongle the day after getting it because it was nowhere near as good as described in the shop. Queue retailer and provider ping-ponging me back and forth saying I could only cancel with the other until the cooloff period ran out, and when their invoice went unpaid they bounced me along a chain of debt collection agencies in the hope I'd give in and pay them.
Always pay the invoices. That way they can't ruin your credit record or anything like that. Once you have done that, make a claim against them in a small claims court to get the money - you can do it easily enough online and it takes 10 minutes. At this point, the issue has been transferred from the billing department to the legal department. The job of the legal department is to make things go away, and if they are even slightly competent you will get a call fairly shortly afterwards from someone who will sort it out for you.
This also doesn't actually solve the issue. So, your broadband is running slow. This is more than likely due to the phone line and not any particular ISP issue. You leave that ISP and sign up with another one - with the same phone number.
So, unless Ofcom are actually saying it's fine for people to have very slow connections - as long as you tell them that's what they're going to get (and presumably charge them the same for someone on a 20mb+ connection), it's fairly pointless making it easier to swap.
They should be forcing BT to upgrade the phone network to guarantee a proper minimum speed.
"This is more than likely due to the phone line and not any particular ISP issue."
I pay the ISP, the ISP pays Openreach.
My contract is with the ISP, not with Openreach. If Openreach causes my ISP to breach their contractual obligations to me, that's entirely between them and Openreach. I have no legal power to force Openreach to do anything.
If the ISP cannot sort the line problems because their processes suck (BT/Plus, Talktalk/AOL and Sky are particular culprits here) then I'm perfectly within my rights to jump ship and go to an ISP who won't let Openreach take the piss.
Thankfully such ISPs exist. As a big hint, none of them are operated by Telcos or Content Providers.
The customers I know that moan the most about their broadband?
The ones that decided to move into £500000 barn conversions 3.5 miles from the nearest village.
"So you didn't think to check the speed before you moved in with your essential online business?"
I know one that lived in the city centre and had a 70MBps connection that worked superbly with their work as an IFA and share dealer etc. I didn't hear from them for 6 months and then the next thing I know is they have moved out to...yes a barn conversion out in the sticks 18 miles away and they are wondering why they only get about 750Kb with 250ms+ pings if the wind blows in the right direction.
I upgraded my infinity service. I would "definitely" get at least 52Mb guaranteed. And I got 60Mb - for a few months and then it dropped to 40.
At that point I was told that despite all earlier promises, 38-55Mb was what my line would now do.
So 40Mb was "fine".
I guess if my speed dropped to 20Mb, then my line would be regraded down again and I would still be paying for the higher speed service.
I'd much rather OfCom looked into 'Activation dates' if they want to crack down on broadband. It's a pain in the arse when you get into a property that is clearly wired up, you've got your own kit and you're willing to pay only to be told BT 'needs' to send (bill you for) an engineer round. Especially when your connection typically fires up at 12.01am on activation day.
I wonder what kind of measurement will be accepted here. For connection speed there's the BT tester but as another commentard has already pointed out moving ISP is unlikely to fix that unless you're moving to a different technology such as FTTC to cable.
For congestion problems (the kind that changing ISPs can(*) fix)..hmmm.
Are ISPs going to be required to provide an official tester hosted on their servers? And really what does that prove given that most of us access data that is outside our ISP's network. Your link into your ISP might be fine but if your ISP's peer transits are running hot you could still be suffering poor service.
An approved speedtester outside your ISP's network? Oh yeah, like that's going to float. Are we really going to be let out of our contract for free just because our connection to a server on some other ISP's network is playing up? Personally I find that the TBB tester is the best indicator of performance but they have no affiliation to any of the ISPs I've used and they also don't host anything I actually want to access so again the throughput I get from that is irrelevant in practice.
(*)Although they could be in the wholesale provider. Plusnet has apparently been chasing down issues in the BTw network since January. Switching ISPs there might not fix the issue either. And anyway who is responsible if your ISP's wholesale provider's network is a bit borked?
"Plusnet has apparently been chasing down issues in the BTw network since January"
You mean 'One part of BT has been chasing down issues in another part of BT since January'
And it's a good reason to jump ship, not put up with it - losing customers en-mass has a galvanising effect on management, vs persuading them to put up with poor service and keep handing over the dosh.
WRT the games Telcos and ISPs play on billing: A small claims filing is usually more than enough to sort that stuff instantly. They're taking the piss because they can and because most consumers will pay up rather than keep on fighting.
You mean 'One part of BT has been chasing down issues in another part of BT since January'
Chinese walls, dear boy :)
They do finally seem to be on top of it but it's taken far too long really. So for the first 10 months of my contract I got full speed 24/7/52. Then nearly six months of slightly naff speeds (single threaded only quelle surprise) for six months at peak hours. Now it seems like I'm back to full speed 24/7/52.
To be fair if they can keep that going again it's a damn fine result from a budget, mass market, ISP.
I didn't jump ship because I didn't really need the speed. It was the engineer in me who objected to seeing a drop in performance and the apparent inability of those responsible to fix it in a timely manner.
Its laughable... OFCOM are so keen to bash the ISPs and yet all too often they have little control over problems of poor speed. While some issues may be in the ISP infrastructure, often speeds and stability are impacted by poor quality lines and network congestion.
It would be nice if OFCOM also leaned on BTw as they are all too often the ultimate cause of speed issues, BT seem to attend to this re-actively, instead of anticipating issues as capacity reaches full they wait till we are affected then drag their heels for a little while - all the time charging for a level of service they are mostly failing to deliver. For example... The "hot" Vlan that I am connected via was on a list for attention when my ISP checked last week, this week it is not, and BTw are saying any speed issues I have will require an SFI visit to investigate despite the fact that the pattern of TAP3 tests clearly shows a capacity issue.
I guess this means that its another couple of weeks while Openjoke and my ISP fight it out, meantime BTw get to bill my ISP for a service they KNOW they are not delivering, and the opportunity for me - the end consumer who pays for this - has no recourse against those responsible who are failing in a legal duty to use reasonable skill and care in delivery of my service. 2 set ups using the same equipment on 2 lines, - and yes I switched them several times, My sisters ADSL connection, (50db att line) same ISP same exchange but a longer line than mine... rock solid, my shorter line (39db) att... dropped far too often with odd clusters of drops at unpredictable frequency, Openjokes answer? there is nothing wrong that we can find and the quality test is only applicable to phone service anyway....
Must be nice to be legally untouchable while you abuse consumers... so how about it OFCOM, are you a real watchdog?..
Oh and heres another suggestion for you OFCOM. Manmy lines exist today ONLY to support broadband so it is high time this was reflected in the quality of lines and enshrined as a requirement that where a line should be technically capable of supporting a broadband service it should do so and at a reasonable level/stability
ODCOM need to make BT guarantee upload speeds also, I have had FTTC now for two years started out with a steady connection 79Mbps 16Mbps up was one of the first on the cabinet. Well as others joined my speeds dropped completing BT speedtests I was requested to complete tap 3.. BT have tap 3 set so upload is minimum IE while testing on my ISP connection upload 10Mbps or more move to BT loggins and upload drops to around 2Mbps.
I have been gathering this data everytime I fail the tap1 test tried to point this out on ISPreview but the BT fan boys said it was not possible. Recently round at a friends they said they were having problems logging into the bt side of tap3. I did this for them and guess what on tap 3 they lost 10Mbps upload speed was hovering around 2Mbps on 80/20 product.
This does need rectifying so would be nice if others could log the speed test results date time etc then lets get this sorted BT have had their own way for far too long..
Force all ISP's in to contractual obligation to only charge for the speed they actually deliver.
No more of this "up to" bullshit ... "You get what you pay for" applies to everything else in life so why not broadband too.
Drop in speed ... no problem, money off the bill at the same percentage and it stays there until the ISP proves the speed is better!
I agree the issue is not the ISP in most cases it's usually the "OpenJoke" network but we as consumers are told we cannot and should not interact with them, that's the job of our ISP, so lets force the ISP to apply pressure in the same way ... wholesale broadband should be charged based on actual throughput not some fictitious ideal!
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