The results from 344 respondents to our latest monthly survey has revealed that 64.7% have experienced anything from one to five or more periods of ISP downtime (service outages) during the past 12 months. Furthermore 10.7% reported that their loss of service had lasted for longer than 24 hours.

How many periods of ISP downtime have you experienced in the last 12 months?
0 (None) - 35.1%
5+ - 20.9%
1 - 17.7%
2 - 14.8%
3 - 8.4%
4 - 2.9%

On average what was the length?
0-30 Minutes - 52.6%
1-5 Hours - 16.5%
24+ Hours - 10.7%
30 - 60 Minutes - 10.4%
5-12 Hours - 5.5%
12-24 Hours - 4%

We should not be too concerned about these findings. Connection problems and downtime are to be expected on such a technically complicated platform. Almost everybody will experience the odd outage, which normally lasts for no more than a few minutes or hours. The new generation of fibre optic broadband services are expected to be a lot more resilient against some of the old problems.

However one in ten people still experience a service outage that lasts for longer than 24 hours, which is a concern. If the fault is with the ISP then they should be prepared to compensate customers for failing to deliver the service.

This month's new survey asks "How should the publicly funded rollout of faster fibre optic broadband be handled?" and questions what the UK governments main priority should be. Vote Here.