New Survey Finds Frustration with UK Broadband ISP Speeds
A new Opinium survey of 2,000 UK adults, which was commissioned by Uswitch, has found that 25% of respondents “regularly fail” to receive the broadband internet speeds they pay for and 7% claim to never get the promised performance. But 42% also admit to not knowing what speed their package is supposed to deliver.
Confusion over broadband speeds is of course nothing new in this market, and indeed the survey notes that only 17% were aware that advertised speeds from an ISP are based on the broadband speed delivered directly to your router, rather than via WiFi. Meanwhile, around 46% of those who claim not to be receiving the speeds they paid for have asked for compensation from their provider.
Finally, 9% are said to have considered leaving their ISP because they don’t receive the speeds they feel they should, while 21% would be willing to pay more for faster broadband (some good news for full fibre providers, perhaps). But we should point out that a lot of FTTP providers now have packages that will give you significantly more speed for the same or less money than older FTTC and ADSL based packages, provided such networks are available in your area.
Advertisement
We suspect that a lot of the remaining frustration with poor speeds probably also stems from those on older copper line based broadband services, since modern full fibre networks are generally much more reliable on this front. On the other hand, even FTTP networks have their caveats (Why Buying Gigabit Broadband Doesn’t Always Deliver 1Gbps).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« ISPs toob and Aquiss Separately Hit 10,000 Full Fibre Customers
It seems harsh on the industry that most people are so uneducated about adsl and vdsl and then the effects of the wifi they have. Feel sorry for the customer service departments having to deal with this. The sooner we have full fibre with symmetric speeds the better.
I agree
The key line here is “only 17% were aware that advertised speeds from an ISP are based on the broadband speed delivered directly to your router, rather than via WiFi”.
Symmetric FTTP will make no difference if people cannot differentiate between wifi and broadband. Faster broadband speeds will probably increase dissatisfaction as the differential between the connection speed to the router and the performance over wifi widens.
Yep. Country is going down the pan, sorry, has already gone down the pan.
I meet sub human morons on a daily basis in my job working in an A&E Department for the NHS.
If I was to write a book I would have to put it in the fiction section as nobody would believe me.
@new_londoner
True – I have 1Gbps but I can only get 700 when I am using my phone in the same room – and about 50-200 upstairs. I know it’s the wifi and it is what it is – I wish others realised that too.
“Sub human morons”
Why on Earth do you work in a caring profession? I hope you are dismissed. The NHS is no place for you.
We dream of modern copper lines. Ooh my dear heaven, just for a few hours. Our internet connection is still on lead sheathed copper cables with aluminium joins. An engineer recently spent multiple hours testing multiple bits of wire to get us close to 20Mb. WeFibre are meant to be running FTTP cables, but their communications are so poor, they should work in government
You know what annoys me, my FTTC sync rate ONLY gets worse.
I see no one improving the infrastructure over the years I have had the service, they just expect customers to put up with like I’ve had to and to be told that only once FTTP comes in will you get a better service.
I’ve went from just under 60Mbps about 7 years ago to around 42-43Mbps now and they wont do FA about it.
I feel that the Telco’s take the pack’n’mic all the time, while not as bad as the USA at time I think the UK ones don’t help themselves.
The slow-down is likely due to increased data usage over time, so the only thing they can realistically do to improve things is to upgrade to FTTP.
@Winston
Right.. as if things like Crosstalk. more people using the cab and water ingress/copper degradation would be a problem..
ffs
Sadly, there is a lot of nonsense (promoted by marketeers, perhaps) on Internet speeds along with “throughput”, “latency”, “jitter”, and “congestion” to name a few. I observe that there is no agreed way to measure “speed” and because of that absence, these guys have made a good start https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/12/248801-measuring-internet-speed/fulltext
So, 2000 people who have no clue their have a best effort, up to and contended service. Even when they are altnets.
Seems more educated is needed. or they need to pay more…. can’t have it both ways otherwise
I wonder if someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why, despite the WiFi link speed between my router and my laptop showing as 433mbs I can only achieve on average 250mbs regardless of whether it’s literally next to the router or in a different room. Connection is 11ac @ 5Ghz.
It has to be more to allow the throughput – it’s called Overhead and is exaclty the same principle applied to connections
or so I GOOGLED!! 🙂
But if I connect via 2.5Ghz the link speed shows as 72mbs and my max d/l speed shows at around 67mbs which is significantly closer to the link speed.
250Mbps from what? A server online? In the next room? Connected by Ethernet or WiFi? Can the thing that is transmitting go that fast? Do you just have a 250Mbos package? Maybe one of the devices or the router can’t handle acquiring or transmitting data at that rate due to HDD or CPU blocks? Maybe animating a speedtest or file transfer is using up all the CPU on your device and it can’t send packets fast enough? Maybe older WiFi devices on the net are causing the router to have to add wait periods or momentarily fall back to 64QAM from 256QAM?
You will be bottlenecked by the least capable link in the chain. It makes sense that the higher your WiFi capacity is, the more likely it is that this limit lies elsewhere
I measure my speed on a regular basis using a Raspberry PiB and speedtest cli tool. This shows download speed falling below the contracted FTTP 300mbs contracted with Zen. It’s all over the place and difficult to get the supplier to get to the bottom of it. Upload speed of 50mbs is rock solid.
Your contract guarantees you 300 at all times?
If you survey the public about anything technical, I would take the replies with a large pinch of salt.
Many are not exactly great at anything technical. (To put it politely)
Add to that ancient laptops etc. and it is not hard to see that these surveys are not rocket science!
Laurence ‘GreenReaper’ Parry:
I have a 500Mbs FTTP Connection (actual test speed 685Mbs at the “junction box” on the wall according to the engineer.
Laptop will definitely handle transfer rates of 900Mbs using Ethernet link.
HD is a 500Gb pcie SSD drive and CPU nowhere near maxed out when I do the speedtest.
I fully understand that I won’t get 500Mbs via WiFi but WiFi network adaptor is 11ac so supports higher speeds, router is GBS capable, all other devices switched off and no interference from external sources as nearest neighbours are couple of hundred metres away.
I understand that the speed of any d/l is governed by the speed of upload at source but I would assume commercial speed test sites would be capable of transmitting at greater than 250Mbs by now.
It isn’t a whinge about the speed but simply looking to understand the reasons why such a large difference.