Posted: 07th Jun, 2008 By: MarkJ
The Director of popular UK ISP
IDNET, Simon Davies, has issued us with a comment warning that
Ofcom's new broadband speed Code of Practice (CoP) has the potential to make the situation worse despite trying to make it better:
"
Unfortunately I think that Ofcom are making things worse while trying to make things better. Few customers are even aware of "sync speed" nor do they care. All they care about is throughput. If Ofcom had focussed on throughput then customers would have visibility of the effects of congestion, traffic shaping, throttling and fair use management practices that are widespread in the industry under the umbrella term of "unlimited services". That would have been of 'real' service to public.
And a simple measure of line length does always equate to attenuation and allows nothing for electrical interference, poor joints, water-logged ducts etc etc. It does not serve the public well to encourage them to demand an SFI call-out in order to get their line up from 7mbps to 8mbps when in all likelihood that will just result in a charge from BT of £170!"
IDNET isn't alone in its opinions, the
ISPA, Entanet and O2 (Be) all expressed similar concerns about Ofcoms focus on line speed in Thursdays comments article (
here).