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Ofcom tells Broadband Firms: '30 Days to Sort your Speeds'

posted by mrpg on Friday March 02 2018, @03:04AM   
from the put-it-in-gear dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

UK watchdog Ofcom tells broadband firms: '30 days to sort your speeds'

Ofcom is tightening the screws – sort of – on broadband providers that play fast and loose with speed promises by imposing a deadline to fix problems or allow customers’ to end their contract early and without a penalty.

Punters are able to exit a deal if velocity slips below a minimum guaranteed level and the provider can’t rectify it, but providers currently have an unlimited resolution time before letting customers leave.

The major update to the code of practice, to be implemented in a year from now, will mean that providers must promote “realistic” speed estimates and “minimum” speed guarantees at the point of sale.

[...] Average download speeds for residential punters in peak hours (8pm to 10pm) are 34.6Mbit/s, and average maximum speeds are 39.1Mbit/s, according to the regulator.

[...] All of the major broadband players have signed up to Ofcom’s code of practice - it covers around 90 per cent of customers in the UK. But there is no legal imperative for these companies to comply with the code.

-- submitted from IRC

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Original Submission

• Re:Don't cry too loud, USA Re:Don't cry too loud, USA (Score: 2) by lentilla on Friday March 02 2018, @09:27AM (1 child)

  by lentilla (1770) on Friday March 02 2018, @09:27AM (#646295)

  Yes, but...

  1. Getting a new customer is far harder (costly) than keeping an existing customer. That's why we had/have cigarette girls [wikipedia.org] - when the market is saturated, the only way to get a new customer is to take them away from your competition. Needless to say, it's far easier to keep a customer mostly happy and have them stay through inertia/laziness than to have to win a new one in a marketplace where the product you are selling is more-or-less identical to all the others.
  2. As for crappy telephone lines - you are quite correct - it is out of the ISPs control. Except... who has likely to exert more influence? A million individual customers complaining about crappy speeds, or a single large ISP yelling at the CEO of the telecom company?

  This move by Ofcom will only be a temporary pain in the arse for ISPs. Instead of giving their customers the right royal run-around ("no, we've looked into it and computer says 'no'"), now they'll agitate to have the problem solved. It probably takes collectively less effort to actually solve the problem (bad copper, whatever) - even if it isn't technically "their fault" - than repeat the same blame-shifting script to every single customer who ever has an issue. At the end of the day, subscribers want Internet, and both ISPs and telecommunications companies get paid to provide a service. It's a fairly simple calculation: get paid, provide service.

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• Re:Don't cry too loud, USA (Score: 2) by mojo chan on Friday March 02 2018, @10:48AM

  by mojo chan (266) on Friday March 02 2018, @10:48AM (#646312)

  BT Openreach, who are responsible for the phone lines, don't give a single fuck about the shitty speeds and never will. Doesn't matter how much ISPs and customers complain, there is no alternative. Maybe you can get Virgin, but other ISPs can't use their cable network so if ADSL is your only option then Openreach has you by the short and curlies.

  Openreach doesn't even install fibre to new builds, they put in copper. There is no incentive for them, especially because with fibre people will just want internet service and not pay for the phone line rental which is a massive cash-cow for them.

  --
  const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)

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