Posted: 17th Apr, 2010 By: MarkJ

UK ISP Vispa Internet will, over the coming weeks, celebrate its 10th Birthday giving every one in ten new broadband customers, and existing customers who upgrade, the chance to win free service for a whole year. But that's not all.
The winners will automatically be selected and the promotion applies to any broadband or broadband and telephone line service (bundle), both home and business. Vispa are also giving the first
3 MONTHS HALF PRICE on all packages.
James Ormerod, co-founder of Vispa, said:
"Times have changed, technologies have come and gone, we've learnt from our experiences, and the internet is now some 900 times faster than a decade ago, but Vispa continues to re-invest, seek out new ways, and constantly aim to be one step ahead whilst continuing to support our extremely loyal customer base, some of whom have been with Vispa since the very beginning and they will be receiving a special treat!
Today also sees the launch of our new availability checker which features trueSpeed. Customers can test their line and be shown the exact "true" speed that their line will achieve and not an "up to" red herring.
Vispa is also the first UK ISP to remove from their website all references to broadband speeds (which most of us can’t have), and the term "up to". We hope that other ISP's will follow suit in the not to distant future."
Removing references to headline speed is an interesting move, although it runs the risk of making Vispa's service more difficult to market and compare. Similarly Vispa does not state how their new "
trueSpeed" checker works. Some of the lines we tested returned the same results as the checker on ISPreview (
here), though Vispa's check failed to provide an estimate for lines that had no previous broadband connection.
This might suggest that the checker only reflects an existing broadband lines performance, which is a method that can also be susceptible to errors inherited from the previous ISP connection.