Which? Survey Claims 12.5 Million UK Homes Frustrated by Poor Broadband

Consumer magazine Which? has conducted a new Populus survey of 2,084 UK households, which claims that 16 million people (59% of respondents) have suffered a problem with their broadband connection during the past year and 12.5 million households were left frustrated as a result.

The “nationally representative online survey“, which was conducted between 21st and 22nd December 2016, also found that 38% of households who suffered internet connection issues have been completely stopped from carrying out one or more online activities as a result. On top of that 31% said that such issues had either completely prevented or delayed their ability to pay bills and conduct online banking.

In addition, 18-24 year olds were found to be “significantly more frustrated” by poor broadband than any other age group, although Which? didn’t provide any solid figures to support that.

Alex Neill, Which? Managing Director of Home Services, said:

“With millions of us frustrated by bad broadband and stopped from doing the simplest of online tasks, we have launched a new, free tool to help people improve their connection.

There is nothing more annoying than your internet cutting out when you’re streaming your favourite programme, or when you’ve spent ages filling your online shopping basket but your connection is too slow to get you to the checkout.

Far too many people are experiencing problems with their broadband across the country and we want to help people to fix it.”

The Which? Speed Test and advice page is much like nearly every other speed testing service on the Internet (such as our own TBB powered one) in that it checks your latency, download and upload performance. However after running a few tests we noted that it tended to report slightly faster speeds than were possible for our line and also reported significantly slower latency than is correct, so take the output with a pinch of salt.

On top of that they also provide a few basic performance tips that highlight the usual suspects of router positioning and different network types (wired, powerline, wifi etc.), plus some information on how to complain about your provider (we also have this). We also have a few useful guides for tweaking WiFi, switching providers and so forth (here).

Naturally any news about crappy broadband usually attracts a comment from Hyperoptic, which are keen to push the strengths of their ultrafast FTTP/B broadband network.

Steve Holford, Hyperoptic’s Chief Customer Officer, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Broadband remains a postcode lottery. Even in some of our biggest cities there are broadband ‘not spots’ where connectivity can be under 1Mbps. The simple fact is that much of our broadband infrastructure depends on copper telephone wires – some of which are 140 years old. Even a large proportion of so called ‘fibre’ services still depend on copper to deliver the last stage of connectivity.

This outdated technology is limited in speed and capacity and isn’t fit for today’s digital world. The onus needs to be on investing and supporting fibre to the premises rollouts that will give consumers the Internet experience that they deserve, as well as preparing the UK economy for the future.”

It should be said that no internet connection is perfect and even the best ones can suffer outages, such as during major power / hardware failures or as a result of damage caused by third-party contractors (cutting cables etc.). Likewise problems with local (home) network hardware and/or software can also create problems of their own (it’s not always the fault of ISPs).

In this case the survey doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the type of problems and time-scales involved, so we’re hesitant to draw any firm conclusions without more data. As usual there’s always room for improvement and hopefully some of the changes being pushed through by Ofcom (here) and the rising adoption of more reliable (vs ADSL) superfast and ultrafast broadband networks should help.