What a lot of people don't realise?

Question

Is that Broadband was unheard of when 95% of the countries Telephone lines were installed.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20071219/tuk-uk-britain-broadband-fa6b408_8.html

BT has campaigned to OFCOM for years regarding what Other broadband companies say to the customer regarding speed and what they actually get for their money.

Thats the whole point drunken fool, No company not even BT can tell you what speed you have till the Broadband is activated. That is why there is so many complaints and BT is the first people these other companies blame.

Ivan why is it BT's fault what other companies tell the consumer what their broadband speed will be?
You also have to consider it is now wholesale/openreach who supply Broadband to all ISP's inc BT all that Wholesale/Openreach can say is that the line may have a speed or up to 8 meg they wont know till the line is activated with broadband. There are too many factors involved such as line length, noise and exchange capacity to give a exact speed. That is the whole point of adaptive rate Broadband it takes 10 days for the best speed to be recognised on the line.

Answer 1

Yes, the broadband companies give very bad 'estimates' of connection speed. What you have to remember is that in the UK, whoever supplies you with your service, the physical connection to your ADSL modem is always done by BT. The broadband supplier has to ask BT to give them a maximum and minimum figure for a particular telephone subscriber. The broadband supplier then tells the subscriber the maximum speed and keeps the minimum secret.

Answer 2

Hello,

(ANS) NOP!! The confusion & consumer complaints about how DSL MAX broadband is marketed in the past & today by the entire ISP industry is definitely and firmly the fault of BT. Its British Telecom who caused this confusion from day one.

**I have said this for several years now. The fault is that BT themselves marketed their new broadband service DSL MAX as an "UPTO 8megs" product. This was wrong and highly misleading yet they (BT) insisted or continued to use this description.

NO!! BT should have marketed their DSL MAX broadband more truthfully and more accurately as for example :-

"BT's new Rate Adaptive Broadband Service" with potential speeds in the range of 4 to 7 Mbps depending upon your location.

This would have prevented alot of angry & disappointed Internet customers. But the ISP industry is also guilty of collusion in this kind of over hyped marketing so the ISP industry isn't guilt free either. Nor can the ISP industry solely blame BT either. They were hand in glove with all this misleading marketing in my opinion.

Ivan
computer veteran,MCSE trained.

Answer 3

This is a very technical problem. Even they said, but you would never get it. The maximum data rate is a number of merit, which you can only dream of.

For example:
1. If BT is using ADSL or DSL, the design of telephone line may block every thing. The usage of ADSL is assuming that there is no "band-limiter" which would pre-fix the frequency bandwidth of every line to 3.3kHz (or maximum less than 7kbit per sec.) This is very common inBritain and even in U.S. - all old system.

2. For cost reduction, the exchange servers are not fully hardware; part of them must be software. In order to boot the hardware performance, those software must include a feature called Quality of Service, which is a software for handling data traffic. Congestion is a common thing because it is still under development.

3. Those hardware are limited in speed with power consumption. 9 Giga instruction per sec. of each processor is the best it can get. Each processor would normally handles 8 channels, i.e. there are only 1Giga instruction per sec. Max speed of each channel would be 1 Giga bits per sec. (note the bit stream in nature in internet) Then, more than thousands of users would share one channels. Conclusively, each users would have on average 1 to 2 Mbit per sec. in data rate.

The true broadband is the optical one but it must be fully optical, i.e. the fibra optic must run from your PC to the exchange server.

Answer 4

The begining of your question is apt, our telephone system was not designed to cope with the traffic it now has to contend with. I've had frustrations to because like everyone else I wanted the best. Actually mine isn't too bad, but it can be inconsistent, nevertheless, considering what has to be done with an old system it amazes me some of us get what we do. First, the ISPs should advertise their products more clearly and be more honest, next we have to decide who is going to finance the upgrades. Constantly comparing ourselves with other countries lacks meaning unless someone explains to us why they are better. People often forget that this country was quick to take on new technology many years ago, this naturally means our infrastructure is aging. Let's have constructive ideas on improvement rather than continue with aimless mud throwing.

Answer 5

Since BT announced that all their subscribers would receive 8Mb speed, my speed dropped to the speed I had before opting for 8Mb levels. Curious. I hear that SKY Broadband is better.

Answer 6

There is a campaign around at the moment, trying to get broadband operaters to change their claims to 'at least' instead of 'up to'. If the speeds are not as promised we should be able to cancel our contract with no penalty.

Answer 7

Amazing how I pay for 8mb at home and most days it feels like I am on dial up again and that is WITH BT!!!!!!!

I apologise. I had no choice but to go with them. I am currently looking for a better provider. I was with NTL, who I thought were really good, however, when we moved, I couldn't continue with their service as it ended at the end of our street!

Any suggestions/experiences would be welcome!

Answer 8

I still have the old-fashioned dial up & it's faster than my friend's broadband.
Perhaps because everyones gone to broadband?

Answer 9

it was, but that doesnt explain how the companies come up with their speeds. Nobody ever gets close to them.

Answer 10

Not a lot of people know that