1 in 3 UK Broadband Users Don't Get their ISP's Promised Speed

Nov. 23, 2015 - PRLog -- One third of respondents (34%) to ISPreview.co.uk's latest survey of Internet users in the United Kingdom have said that their broadband provider (ISP) does not deliver even close to the service speed that was originally estimated for their connection.

The good news is that the vast majority of respondents do at least keep an eye on their broadband performance by conducting regular connection speedtests, with most viewing such testing as being either "very important" (49%) or of "average importance" (41%) to the monitoring of their connection (only 9.5% felt that it was "not important").

On average, how often do you run a speedtest (pick closest)?
Once a Week - 35.8%
Once a Month - 31.5%
Once a Day - 17.8%
Very rarely / Never - 14.7%

"The ability to understand the real-world performance of your broadband connection is useful for both helping to spot faults and identifying whether or not your ISP is delivering the promised performance," said ISPreview.co.uk's Founder, Mark Jackson. "Thankfully most consumers (60%) do receive close to the estimated performance given by their ISP, although clearly the proportion that do not is still far too high."

"The Government also gauge the progress of their national Broadband Delivery UK programme by using some of the same fixed line performance estimates as ISPs, which today's results suggest may not always be reliable and that could impact the perception of their "superfast broadband" (24Mbps+) targets. Mind you speedtests don't always give consumers the full picture and sometimes the problems can be due to issues that exist beyond an ISPs ability to control."

"For example, a slow local WiFi connection or poor home wiring might be just as easy to blame for a loss of performance as a general network fault on the Internet providers own infrastructure. Whatever the cause, if you do spot a persistent and noticeable loss of speed then let your ISP know ASAP. Ofcom requires ISPs to resolve significant losses of speed and if they can’t then you can often switch provider without penalty, although this may not always solve the underlying problem," concluded Jackson.