A Look at How Other Countries Advertise Broadband ISP Speeds vs UK

Over the past couple of years there’s been a ferocious debate in the United Kingdom over the question of how fixed line broadband providers should advertise their service speeds and this got us to thinking, how do other countries advertise line speeds? Let’s take a look.

Until recently the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) required that any headline speed being promoted by an ISP must be achievable by at least 10% of their customers (i.e. the fastest 10th percentile) and these figures should be preceded by an “up to” qualifier, as well as an explanation of any limitations that may hamper the connection.

However the ASA has now proposed a significant change (here), which would require broadband ISPs to display an “average” (median) download speed measured at busy peak times (i.e. 8pm to 10pm). The proposal would effectively reflect the average (median) speed of a particular package. All of this made us wonder whether other countries advertised fixed broadband speeds in the same way.

Firstly, we should point out that service speeds can be influenced by all sorts of different factors (network congestion, poor home wiring, WiFi signal strength etc.) and technology choice is one of the biggest differentiators. The most common fixed line broadband technologies in the United Kingdom are as follows.

Primary UK Home Broadband Technologies

ADSL2+
Theoretical Peak Speed: 24Mbps download / 1.4Mbps upload

Coverage: Nearly universal coverage and used by just under half of fixed broadband connections

Performance Caveats: Too many to mention, although the main issue tends to be signal degradation over copper line distance (i.e. the longer the line from a telephone exchange, the slower its speed). ADSL2+ performance is notoriously variable, with some people getting under 1-2Mbps and others achieving close to 20Mbps (you’re unlikely to get much above c.20Mbps on ADSL2+ in the UK).

Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2)
Theoretical Peak Speed: 80Mbps download / 20Mbps upload*

Coverage: Available to around 90% of premises and used by roughly a quarter of fixed broadband connections

Performance Caveats: Similar variety of problems to ADSL2+, except the VDSL2 service is more reliable as the local street cabinet is fuelled by a fibre optic line closer to your home. Nevertheless the same issue with signal degradation over copper line distance (between cabinet and homes) does still occur. Performance can thus be highly variable but it’s usually a big improvement on ADSL2+.

* VDSL2 could in theory push to 100Mbps+ (download) but for various technical reasons it’s capped at 80Mbps in the UK, except via some altnets. A newer VDSL2-Vplus standard can even do 300Mbps but in the UK this has been skipped in favour of G.fast.

Cable (DOCSIS / EuroDOCSIS)
Theoretical Peak Speed: 350Mbps download / 20Mbps upload*

Coverage: Available to over 50% of premises and used by less than a quarter of fixed broadband connections

Performance Caveats: Most performance issues are usually the result of Virgin Media oversubscribing their capacity in specific locations, network faults or incorrect power levels for individual properties. Otherwise cable speeds should deliver close to their advertised rate.

* This is the current peak speed set by Virgin Media’s residential service, although DOCSIS itself can theoretically do Gigabit speeds and future upgrades (DOCSIS 3.1) will support this.

Fibre-to-the-Premises / Home (FTTP/H)
Theoretical Peak Speed: 1Gbps download / 1Gbps upload (1000Mbps)*

Coverage: Available to around 3% of premises and take-up isn’t yet high enough to make an impact.

Performance Caveats: Nothing worth mentioning. Limited network capacity and external hardware restrictions are more likely to reduce the top speeds than anything on the technology itself.

* 1Gbps symmetric tends to be the fastest residential FTTP/H service offered by ISPs in the UK, although this is more of an economic restriction and Scientists are still trying to figure out the limits of optical fibre (multi-Terabit speeds are already possible).

Naturally other countries will adopt a different mix of broadband technologies. For example, Sweden is dominated by FTTP/H with less than 20% on Cable and 30% taking VDSL (FTTC) or ADSL. By comparison Italy is almost entirely ADSL / VDSL based, although they do have a growing FTTP/H market.

The following chart is an extract from the recent EU Broadband Process Report 2017, which offers a simplified overview of fixed broadband technology by country and market share in the European Union. We will be looking outside of the EU too but this still gives a good indication of how the market shares differ by technology.

Obviously it would take us a very long time to examine all of the countries in the EU or even the world and so instead we’ve decided to focus on a smaller cross-section, which we’ve chosen because they all reflect different markets and deployment scenarios. A few of these countries are closer to the UK model than others and to save time we’re only going to look at some of the largest ISPs in each market.

Most of those we picked also use the Latin alphabet, which makes our translation work easier and less prone to error. However we did have to leave out a fair few ISPs because we couldn’t find any clear details of their packages, usually due to difficulties with the language translation.

Sample Packages from Domestic ISPs

Take note that all of the data for this article was gathered during July – August 2017 and we generally only picked a couple of packages from each provider (the cheapest and fastest options). Now let’s kick things off by looking at our closest neighbour.

France

Generally speaking, France is dominated by ADSL and hybrid fibre VDSL technologies, although they have a rapidly growing base of FTTP/H/B services in major cities. We found that FTTP/H/B services advertised peak package speeds (no ‘up to’ or ‘averages’) and the same was true for their ADSL options, which promoted 20Mbps for downloads and 1Mbps for uploads.

The exception was Orange, which promoted their ADSL and VDSL services without even mentioning a headline speed.

Orange – Jet Fibre

500Mbps down – 200Mbps up – €33.99

Orange – Zen ADSL / VDSL

No speed stated – €19.99

SFR (ADSL2+)

20Mbps down – 1Mbps up – €24.99

SFR (Fibre)

1Gbps down – 100Mbps up – €24.99

Flick over the page for more countries and some analysis..