Comment: How much worse does broadband have to get?

Posted on 27 Apr 2007 at 13:03

Detect, if you will, the pattern in the following statistics:

• 51,000 people were so dissatisfied with their broadband service last year that they complained to telecoms regulator Ofcom.
  
• Which?'s latest broadband survey recommends just three ISPs compared with last year's eight, leading the watchdog to declare 'satisfaction with broadband suppliers is in sharp decline'.
  
• Only 73 per cent of PC Pro readers would recommend their ISP to somebody else, one of the lowest satisfaction ratings across our 12 award categories.

Congratulations if you managed to reach the conclusion that Britain's broadband provision is going to the dogs. Hard luck if you didn't manage to join the dots, but may I recommend you pop over to the Situations Vacant section of the aforementioned Ofcom's website? Someone with your rare talent for overlooking the bleeding obvious will have no problem landing a job with the country's most toothless regulator.

To be fair to Ofcom, it's hard to know where to start with the problems in the broadband industry. Is it the fact that nobody has the first clue what speed their Internet connection should really achieve, because ADSL Max services are sold on the basis of a mythical 8Mb/sec maximum rather than their true speed? Or perhaps Ofcom should be investigating services sold as 'unlimited' when they're anything but, a sore point that's moved more than 3,000 people to sign a petition on the Prime Minister's website. I suspect Tony will leave that one for Gordon to sort out.

Maybe we should all be worried about the bigger picture, and the general consensus that peak-time broadband speeds are slumping as the country increasingly switches off Dancing on Ice With a Bloke Who's Married to Angela Rippon's Second Cousin and tunes into the bandwidth-chomping YouTube or 4 on Demand instead. 'We've seen more complaints about peak-time speed problems over the past six months or year,' Andrew Ferguson, editor of Thinkbroadband.com, recently told us.

The simple truth is that IP was never designed to handle video, and is spectacularly inefficient at doing so. Even Ofcom's director of policy, Douglas Scott, recently conceded to a Westminster e-forum: 'Three years ago, a graphics-heavy website would have been heavy usage. Now, heavy usage is a high-definition film. This rapid increase in traffic is generating substantial congestion in some parts of the Internet.'

The only bright spot on the horizon is BT's much lauded 21CN network, which promises connections of up to 24Mb/sec by 2011. However, there's more chance of Bush and Blair volunteering for an open-top parade through the streets of Baghdad than BT replacing the rickety copper wiring that leads to your home within the next decade. Why? Because the regulatory environment in Britain means BT would have to open up the fibre lines to its competitors, eroding any financial incentive to upgrade the lines. Who sets the regulatory environment? Our old friend Ofcom, of course.

Never mind. You could always sign up with cable provider Virgin Media (this week's name for NTL/Telewest), which can run fibre-optics flooding with 10Mb/sec to your door. Although NTL didn't fare particularly well for customer care in our reader survey, and Virgin Media recently admitted it was struggling to cope with the deluge of calls it's been receiving since its much-publicised spat with Sky. So, even if you're fortunate enough to be in a cable area, good luck getting through.