Broadband feature

Are we being duped into paying for ever-faster broadband?

Are you paying for a high-speed broadband connection you don’t really need?

Thursday 22 December, 2011

By Helen Thomas

As theoretical broadband speeds offered by providers sky rocket into triple figures, are we being hoodwinked into paying for speeds and download allowances that we simply don’t need?

How often do you find yourself wondering how we ever got anything done before the dawn of the internet era? Having to book holidays in person at the travel agent, actually going into your bank to transfer money, and, OMG, not hearing the minute-by-minute updates on your friend’s disastrous date as they post every cringe-worthy line on Twitter.

The happy days when your best “lost in the post” excuse for not having sent off a cheque to pay for something would actually wash.

And long before we could all be our own doctor, able to find wildly varied diagnoses, not to mention stomach churning images, for that embarrassing rash you developed after your recent holiday.

In fact, a recent survey of 20,000 Brits by broadband provider TalkTalk found that 30% of everything we do at home, from shopping to finding a plumber, now takes place online.

You will find few of us who would argue that widely available broadband hasn’t revolutionised our lives for the better, allowing us to get things done more quickly than before. Making communications - from Oldham to Ouagadougou - easier than our forebears could ever have imagined back when the horse and rider were dispatched to deliver our “urgent” news to the next hamlet.

But as providers race to bring us not just superfast broadband, but now “ultrafast” connections, how many of us truly need to pay top dollar for broadband speeds of 50Mb broadband or 100Mb broadband?

The great speed race

Just two years ago only 8% of UK residential broadband users were on packages with advertised speeds above 10Mb. In May 2011 that figure had increased to almost half of all broadband users.

With BT (www.BT.com) undertaking what it claims is one of the fastest fibre network roll-outs in the world, aiming to make it’s up to 40Mb and 100Mb fibre broadband available to two-thirds of the population by 2014, that number looks likely to jump again in the next two years.

While it’s undeniably hard to resist the lure of 100Mb broadband - after all, who could possibly be willing to wait more than a minute and a half to download Conan the Barbarian 3D for what may be the greatest viewing experience of your life - is it worth the high cost?

The price difference between Virgin Media (www.Virginmedia.com)’s up to 10Mb connection and it’s up to 100Mb connection is a substantial £21.50 per month - £258 a year. Given that Virgin Media’s 10Mb connection delivers average speeds of 9.66Mb - already 42% higher than the UK’s average connection speed of 6.8Mb - is having 10 times this amount necessary to anyone but communities of gamers who are all online concurrently?

The reality of “up to” speeds

By 2013, BT will have rolled-out its ADSL2+ - faster copper broadband - network, making it available to approximately 90% of UK households. ADSL2+ technology is capable of delivering speeds of up to 24Mb, which are - in theory - pretty decent, and would probably be more than adequate for most of us.

The issue, however, is that despite the reasonable speeds on offer via traditional telephone lines, the speeds that most of us get in reality are nowhere near those advertised - in fact, they are regularly less than half of the “up to” speeds advertised.

According to communications regulator Ofcom’s May 2011 speed tests, the average broadband speed in the UK is just 6.8Mb versus an average advertised speed of 15Mb.

Primarily this is because of the significant deterioration in speed that occurs with increasing length of copper wire, so the further you are from the exchange, the lower your broadband speed will be. In cities this is often, though not always, less apparent than in rural environments, where people are much more sparsely populated and may be a long way from their local exchange.

Fibre optic cable is purpose designed to deliver massive amounts of data at lightning fast speeds and it experiences very little of the deterioration that affects copper wire over increasing distance.

The result being that the difference between the top actual speeds delivered by our telephone network - 24Mb, and the lower fibre speeds - 30Mb, although just 6Mb in theory, can actually be as much as 25.7Mb in practice.

In Ofcom’s speed test results, Karoo’s “up to” 24Mb ADSL telephone wire connection was found to deliver average speeds of between 5.2 and 7Mb, whereas Virgin Media’s 30Mb fibre connection averaged between 30.1 and 30.9Mb.

With little middle ground on offer, many of us are left with the “choice” of having to pay through the nose for fibre, or face the snail’s pace of below-par ADSL.

Clampdown on provider’s exaggerated speed claims

Consumers will soon be able to get slightly more realistic information about broadband speeds - not just those available to a handful of people living on top of a telephone exchange. The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) - the agency responsible for writing the government’s advertising codes, have said that broadband providers must be able to demonstrate that speeds they advertise are achievable for at least 10% of their customers.

However, while this may reduce the overstated claims of some providers, it will still leave 90% of customers no clearer on what speed they are likely to get - and will lead to more of us paying the higher prices for fibre believing the delivery speeds are more dependable.

What we get versus what we need

The connection speed we are able to get is only half of the equation though.

Is the barrage of news articles about how slow the UK’s broadband is leaving even those of us with good connection speeds brainwashed into thinking we need a fibre connection?

Even if you have a choice of the full array of speed options currently on the market, does a couple of hours on Facebook, some online shopping, and a sneaky rerun of Strictly Come Dancing on BBC iPlayer here and there really necessitate a 100Mb connection? With the money you could save by taking a slower broadband package - but one still suitable for your requirements - you could pay for your own set of dance lessons. Jazz hands to that!

A survey of 2,000 UK broadband customers by Computeractive found that around 85% were paying for high-speed connections they may not really need.

Even Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards has said it is only families with teenage children who have shown any real need for the much faster fibre optic broadband. He explained that: “social networking, streaming and sharing from the teenage bedroom - leading to local contention, the victim of which is the person typically paying the bill - seems to be among the strongest reasons for adopting superfast broadband”.

Could the great speed debate, in part, be a case of keeping up with the Joneses? In the face of the 100Mb connection we could have, does our own connection merely appear to be inadequate?

No-one really needs a Ferrari when they only drive to Tesco once a week. It might look good, but it’s expensive and ever so slightly unnecessary. And your shopping won’t fit in it anyway...

Download times for different connection speeds

Even if we know what speed we can expect, how many of us know what that equates to in download times in order to decide what exactly we need?

Well, here you go:

If you are crawling along on a 2Mb actual speed connection, you may be drumming your fingers down to the bone waiting 75 minutes for a high-quality movie to download. For 8Mb connections this drops to 19 minutes, 8 minutes for 20Mb and just 3 minutes at 50Mb.

However, for a 45-minute TV show to download it is just 15 minutes - even on a 2Mb connection, falling to 4 minutes, 2 minutes and 1 minute for 8Mb, 20Mb and 50Mb connections respectively.

And to download an album, you will barely have time to cool your heels at just 4 minutes at 2Mb, 1 minute at 8Mb, 30 seconds on a 20Mb connection and a mere 10 seconds at 50Mb.

For households with dedicated gamers, multiple users all online at the same time or those who regularly stream films and TV, fibre connections can truly be beneficial, in doing away with frustrating connection lags and slowing of speeds.

But for those of us with more bog standard internet needs, it is just possible that, until we’re relying on the internet for the likes of education, managing our energy consumption and healthcare, superfast broadband is an unnecessary expense that we are being talked into?

Superfast blur photo by Eyesplash.