Broadband Speeds: What You See Is What You Get?

Broadband speeds have caused a lot of controversy over the years. A recent Ofcom report once again highlighted the immense differences between advertised and real world broadband speeds.

With broadband it seems, what you see is nearly always not what you get.

Another way in which consumers often complain they are being hoodwinked, is through the use of the term – ‘unlimited’. In order to counteract heavy users, broadband providers nearly always apply a fair use policy, or traffic management to users’ connections.

Traffic management can simply be explained as a method broadband providers use to slow everyone down at peak times in order that everyone gets the same level of service. I suppose you could call it Broadband Communism.

A video filmed by an outraged member of the proletariat indicates just how bad the problem of traffic management can get and in this example we can see the huge difference in peak time broadband performance between two major broadband providers.

The key difference between Be Broadband and BT Broadband is the size of the customer base.

BT is marketing to all of its telephone customers with its broadband products but in reality the network would struggle if all of them were online at once.

Peak time use, between 4pm and 9pm sees broadband providers like BT slow down connections deliberately in order that everyone gets a fair share of the bandwidth.

Smaller broadband providers like Be are able to offer faster speeds without any traffic management in place because they appeal to a niche market.

Loved by gamers thanks to the very low latency (response) times on its connections and loved by download junkies thanks to the seemingly bottomless download policy, Be users often join and never leave.

So if you are looking for a broadband provider who won’t limit your connection speed or downloads no matter what time of day then perhaps you have just made yourself part of that niche.

General users who don’t do much surfing or perhaps just check emails and visit a few websites each day probably don’t notice much difference in connection speeds during peak times, therefore they probably don’t need to do anything about it.

Traffic management will always be controversial, especially when it is tied into advertising which boasts unlimited this, unlimited that.

By choosing the right broadband provider in the first place, making sure your needs, reflect its policies then you should be able to surf freely without fear of a throttling.

This is a guest post from Choose, a consumer site covering broadband in the UK including full reviews of providers like Plusnet and guides on topics such as where to get no contract broadband.