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posted by janrinok on Tuesday August 07 2018, @06:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the s-l-o-w-e-r dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Only one of top 12 ISPs raised listed speed after new truth-in-advertising rule.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/isps-listed-speeds-drop-up-to-41-after-uk-requires-accurate-advertising/

Most broadband providers in the UK "have been forced to cut the headline speeds they advertise when selling deals" because of new UK rules requiring accurate speed claims, according to a consumer advocacy group.

"Eleven major suppliers have had to cut the advertised speed of some of their deals, with the cheapest deals dropping by 41 percent," the group wrote last week.

The analysis was conducted by Which?, a brand name used by the Consumers' Association, a UK-based charity that does product research and advocacy on behalf of consumers.

"BT, EE, John Lewis Broadband, Plusnet, Sky, Zen Internet, Post Office, SSE, TalkTalk, and Utility Warehouse previously advertised their standard (ADSL) broadband deals as 'up to 17Mbps,'" the group noted in its announcement on Saturday. "The new advertised speed is now more than a third lower at 10Mbps or 11Mbps."

"TalkTalk has completely dropped advertising speed claims from most of its deals," the consumer group also said. "Vodafone has also changed the name of some of its deals: Fibre 38 and Fibre 76 are now Superfast 1 and Superfast 2."

The new rules were implemented in May by the Committees of Advertising Practice, the UK ad industry's self-regulatory body. Which? said it had been "campaigning for an advertising change since 2013."

Previously, ISPs were allowed to advertise broadband speeds of "up to" a certain amount, even if only one in 10 customers could ever get those speeds, Which? wrote. "But the new advertising rules mean that at least half of customers must now be able to get an advertised average speed, even during peak times (8-10pm)," the group said.

The entry-level speed tiers were apparently the least accurate before the rule change. While advertised speeds dropped the most on entry-level tiers, there were drops in higher-speed tiers as well.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday August 07 2018, @07:55PM (5 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) on Tuesday August 07 2018, @07:55PM (#718420) Journal

    oh, no, I think SIZE isn't why things feel slow.

    It's fucking wrapping everything in 10 layers of AJAX calls, shadowdom wrappers, and analytics scripts.

    Go to a twitter page, and you don't get a flat html page with tweets in it. Oh no. You get a content wrapper, and have to wait on a second request to load offsite script dependencies(starting with the ad ones). Then those finally get loaded and kick off a onload() event driving some AJAX request to get the actual URL's real content. Except that is queued after all the ad loading scripts. The slowness of a typical modern webpage doesn't even have to do with bandwidth.

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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Tuesday August 07 2018, @09:07PM (1 child)

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday August 07 2018, @09:07PM (#718437)

    > Go to a twitter page

    Can't believe the internet got to the point where so many discussion has to devolve into terrible insults and shameless curses.
    "Go to twitter", "Check my facebook", "See this instagram post", "Read the Fox News article" ... Go wash your mouth with soap ! Can we get back to cursing people moms, bodily parts and/or fluids ?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @08:04AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @08:04AM (#718698)

      I avoid trying to load a facebook page like the plague. I have a five year old Celeron, with only a 2 GHz single core, and only 4 Gigabytes of RAM memory.

      It chokes. It does my CAD work just fine, but social media pages, ( and even YouTube these days ) will lock it up. I can still see the videos, but generally I have to download them first and convert them to .MP4 before they will play. The older stuff works great, but the newer stuff is a real pain, hence my ignorance about the later music stars.

      I am older and I really don't give that much of a damm anymore anyway. Its not like I have to impress anybody that I know who the latest Hollywood heartthrobs are anymore. The last one I had heard much about was some dude named Beeber, and I became aware of him only because he kept showing up on the news a lot... I never figured out just what he did.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:39PM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:39PM (#718769) Homepage
    Nah - I get a "We've detected that JavaScript is disabled in your browser. Would you like to proceed to legacy Twitter?" page that I can then click on, and then I see just the tweets. Indirect, but on the whole lightweight. Annoyingly, the "internal" links on the legacy twitter pages are also ones that cause an intermediate questioning redirect, rather than being ones that would send me straight to the appropriate legacy page, which becomes a drag really quickly. I generally only follow twitter links if I know in advance I'm really really really interested in what someone's going to say.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday August 08 2018, @08:11PM (1 child)

      by ikanreed (3164) on Wednesday August 08 2018, @08:11PM (#718966) Journal

      It's so you don't copy and paste a link to share and put your friends on a "lower engagement site layout"

      Much more important to capture as many advertising dollars as possible compared to making a product people actually like, when you're a tech monopoly.

      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:24AM

        by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:24AM (#719136) Homepage
        The sane way to do that is to have a JS shim in the non~JS page that immediately redirects to the full-bloat page.
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves