Why you won’t get the mobile broadband speeds Ofcom claims

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

On first inspection, Ofcom paints a rosy picture of the state of mobile broadband in Britain. O2 (somewhat surprisingly, given our past real-world tests) tops the charts with average speeds close to 3Mbits/sec, with only Orange customers looking like they should find a new network.

However, examine Ofcom’s testing methodology more closely, and it becomes clear that those chart-topping 3Mbits/sec speeds are likely to be far higher than the average customer will receive.

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Named and shamed: the “unlimited” liars

Friday, March 25th, 2011

For years, fixed and mobile broadband providers have used the term “unlimited” to advertise services that are anything but.

We’ve moaned about it for years, and last month even our normally docile telecoms regulator said the term “unlimited” was being abused.  “There are people offering unlimited packages that contain a fair-use policy that means what you are getting is not unlimited,” said Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards. “If you are claiming unlimited then it needs to be unlimited.”

It seems the industry wasn’t listening. New data tariffs are still being advertised as “unlimited” even when they have specific download caps.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has been conducting a review of broadband advertising, but frankly, we’re tired of waiting for this weak-kneed, self-regulating body to get its act together.

So, from now on, whenever we see a new tariff being advertised as “unlimited” when it patently isn’t, we’re going to add it to our blog of shame.

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Who’s really behind the net neutrality code?

Friday, March 11th, 2011

The news that major ISPs are on the verge of signing up to a Broadband Stakeholder Group code of conduct on net neutrality and traffic management might sound like good news for consumers, but what will it do for the net neutrality debate?

The issue of how ISPs treat packets of data from various sources, and whether they can prioritise some websites over others if they have been paid for express delivery, has been hotly contested and there is a possibility that these guidelines will settle a dispute that regulator Ofcom has resolutely distanced itself from.

Indeed, in the absence of any higher authority there is a danger that the BSG guidelines could be seen as de facto regulations on how ISPs can approach net neutrality and traffic shaping – largely because the BSG is, it claims, “the UK Government’s leading advisory group on broadband”. It’s even part funded by the Government.

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O2 data charges: punishing the many to pay for the few?

Friday, June 11th, 2010

O2 has delivered some astonishing statistics to justify its controversial decision to scrap unlimited data plans. In a blog post published by chief executive Ronan Dunne, the company claims that only 0.1% of its customers consume almost a third of the data of the network, while the average O2 user consumes only 200MB of data.

“We don’t think it’s fair that the many should subsidise the behaviour of the few, and we think that we have a responsibility to our customers to address this kind of imbalance,” Dunne stated.

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How to switch off Virgin Media’s mobile broadband image compression

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Recently, I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time in the company of 3G dongles for our “Mobile Broadband Con” feature, which will be hitting the shelves on 11 February.

One of the aforementioned cons of mobile broadband is image compression – a process where the networks water down the images on websites to conserve bandwidth. The end result is that sites such as the BBC homepage look as if they’ve been dipped in the bath, and in my experience, the compression barely saves any time at all on page downloads.

Many networks allow you to switch the compression off if you wish. Virgin Media doesn’t, on the rather dubious premise that it’s helping customers stay within their data download limits.

However, there is a sneaky way to beat the Virgin image washout, which I accidentally stumbled across during my tests. Virgin piggybacks on the T-Mobile network, and if you download T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk Accelerator software, you’ll find that it can be used to adjust the compression on Virgin, too.

Britain’s broadband leaders: arrogant and ambitionless

Friday, November 27th, 2009

How is Britain going to get the next-generation broadband network it desperately needs to compete in the modern world? That was the question posed to a panel of more than a dozen industry leaders and experts at the latest Westminster eForum, but convincing answers were desperately thin on the ground.

Instead of courage, creativity and innovation, the mood coming from Britain’s broadband leaders was complacency, resignation and a weary confession that we’re “still going round the same issues time and time again”.

The half of the country that’s connected to fibre provided by Virgin Media, BT or any number of local projects can almost certainly look forward to download speeds of 40Mbits/sec plus in the next few years. But what about the other half – the half living outside of the big cities that are already struggling on sub-standard connections?

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The problem with mobile broadband

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

I’m a big fan of mobile broadband. In theory. The idea of a connection wherever you go, the promise of lower costs than fixed broadband, the possibility of even higher speeds than fixed! The reality, which I’m living through right now, remains frustrating.

For the last few days, I’ve had to “rely” on mobile broadband as I wait for my broadband connection to go live in my new house. The trouble is, it doesn’t work at all well. The first problem is reception: I don’t live in central London but in deepest Bucks, and that means I can only get a GPRS connection. (more…)

A broadband cap I actually like

Monday, October 20th, 2008

When it comes to mobile broadband, it’s easy to get bogged down in specs such as download speeds and data caps. But sometimes it’s the things that are never mentioned on the spec sheets that make the difference.

Here, for example, are two mobile broadband dongles from O2 (left) and BT (click here to read about BT’s new mobile broadband service). One causes me endless hassle on the train journey into work of a morning, while the other is painless. The difference? That little white piece of string that keeps the BT dongle’s cap connected to its body. 

Something as innocuous as a cap retainer might sound utterly trivial, but I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve ended up on my hands and knees, picking my way through the half-eaten bag of Doritos and discarded newspapers under the train table, trying to find the AWOL O2 cap. It doesn’t even fit on the other end of the stick!

The BT cap, meanwhile, remains firmly anchored to the stick, no matter how many hard-disk threatening bumps the train encounters.  How much does that little piece of string add to the cost of the device? A tiny fraction of sod all. How much difference does it my mobile broadband “experience”? A pretty sizeable one.

Comedian solves BT’s broadband problems

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Dave Gorman is a very funny man. However, he’s lost his sense of humour over his faltering BT broadband connection, which disappeared down a black hole three days ago.

“I’m not a violent man but right now I would cheerfully hurt someone from BT,” Gorman writes on his blog. “In fact my sense of proportion has diminished to the point where I can’t work out if it would be in particularly bad taste to suggest that running Kris Marshall over again would be, well, satisfying. Probably.
Still, if he will advertise BT’s services…”

However, what piqued my interest was his superb suggestion of ISPs providing mobile broadband dongles to people whose landlines have given up the ghost: a courtesy connection in the same way garages provide a courtesy car when your runaround is being repaired.

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T-Mobile’s magic stick

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

This past fortnight, I have been mostly testing USB mobile broadband modems. Testing them until my eyes bleed.

Until yesterday, T-Mobile had provided us with the larger Huawei E220 USB modem you can see at the top of the photo here. And to be honest, it was pretty ropey. Tim Danton described last week the trouble he had installing the device and the download speeds we recorded – even when sat upon the 6th floor balcony here at Dennis Towers – were distinctly underwhelming. Speeds were typically hovering around 300-400Kb/sec, placing T-Mobile well behind rivals such as Vodafone and 3.

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