I see this survey was tested in "more than 300 households" - hardly a relevant study really !! I have been with Virgin for about 3 years now, & was always advised that I would never get full speed due to the distance from the exchange. I'm on an 8mb deal, speeds average around 3mbs.The only problems I've ever had have been with the phone lines, & Virgin have always been great at getting BT to sort this ASAP, & compensating me immediately. A prime example was a couple of years ago when both my phone & broadband went down after very high winds. Called BT, they said couldn't get an engineer out for 10 days due to the widespread problems. Called Virgin, & an hour later BT were on my mobile asking if it would be convenient for an engineer to call the following morning !!
I agree with Paul in York, it's BT who need to get into the 21st Century.

Richard, Paignton, Devon

I use BE and receive around 6-8mb because of the distance from the exchange so whilst they offer 24mb this is a lot better than the 2mb on 8mb service I used to have. It is not the ISP that is to blame as such but the ageing infrastructure, can we really expect BT to rip up every bit of Copper for Fibre Optic?
Of Course not, it would be impractical and vastly expensive, instead we just have to come up with new technology, such as cheaper Satelite broadband, with an ADSL up load.

John Nelhams, London, UK

I connected to Be Broadband earlier in the year and they give 24 meg, BUt I get about 10... So would say if you want speed and good service go with them

Fergus, London,

Ofcom, the OFT and the ASA should be investigating this issue now, not in a years time when all of these crooks have made their fortunes and disappeared off into the sunset !!!

I would suggest that only the speeds acheived by 75% or more of an ADSL providers customers may be quoted as a realistic figure. If an ADSL provider has 75% of customers who have a 960Kbps then they will obviously be forced out of the market, allowing the better performing providers to prosper. Okay so some of us aren't going to get the best performance, we can accept that, but if someone says 'up to 8Mbps' then it is obvious that we are going to expect closer to 8Mbps than 960Kbps !!!!!

Dave, St Albans, Herts

I paid for 20Mbits/sec from Virgin Media , but only received 4Mbits/sec. I called them up in July and got a free new modem that now works at +16Mbits/sec.

Lyndsay Williams, Cambridge, UK

After 3 years with a particular ISP at 2Mbs we were livid to find that they had left us on 2Mbs for the last year when we could have been on 8Mbs. We upgraded to 8Mbs (our line is good and we're right next to the exchange) and our line should get 8. We got exactly the same speeds; sub 1Mbs as before (never ever above 2) with dialupeqsue speeds at peak times and a small cap. We dropped them as an ISP and found another one. We're now on upto 16Mbs. Typical Speeds are 3-4Mbs which I'm very happy with as we can now watch video and there's no cap. When it's in a really good mood it's done 12Mbs on downloads and speedtests.

I just wish BT would get a move on with 21CN.

Paul, York, UK

Orange users are submitting their speeds on a website which is publishing the speeds, categorised by UK regions related to tehir telephone exchange. This I think gives a much clearer picture of what speeds people are getting. The regional speeds are on www.orangeproblems.co.uk ( http://www.orangeproblems.co.uk ) if you want to take a look!

From what I know, this is the biggest survey of broadband speeds conducted on any one individual ISP - and the speeds are nowhere near the up to 8Meg speeds promised in most regions!

I'll be keeping an eye on it as it's useful info - showing that the biggest companies are not necessarily the best!

Tim Shaw, liverpool, united kingdom

In my case, the company I use are advertising a slower connection than that I have got.

Sasha, Salford, England

The Broadband con is largely to do with companies tricking customers into thinking that fast speeds are acheievable down the phone line. Wrong! The copper wires have limits, namely the distance from the exchange nonsense and other factors.

I've been with NTL (now Virgin) for 4 years and there broadband is down the fibre optic cable. I always get the max speed that my package allows and have never had any problems, or complaints.

Philip Dodd, London,

I have been offered "up to" 8MB by BT, told my line will support 1mb (even thought it was running happily at 2mb last year) and since i have been giving BT MORE money i have never achieved a speed better than 0.5mb!!!! shocking all my phonecalls to BT have resulted in talking to someone in India who i cant understand and who dosnt understand me!

Rhys, newport,

With my last ISP I was charged for "up to 2 MB" at £17.99 per month. What I got was 512 bkps.
I checked what BT could give me. I was told between 512 bkps and 1 MB. I thought their price was pretty steep for what I would actually get.
I settled for the Pipex Homecall package. Line rental, 01 and 02 calls 24/7 and BB for £29.99 a month. They promised me I would get between 1 MB and 1.5 MB. I have no complaints. At peak times I get 1.3 MB. Off peak 1.4 MB. I now pay only £6.50 per month for the BB as part of the package deal.
BT have raked in the money as a monopoly for years. They should have upgraded the phone lines years ago, but they now have to pay shareholders, so lines get repaired when they break down or someone puts a JCB through one. Even then they are still replaced with the old copper stuff. When will we get the speeds like they have in Japan? This year, next year, sometime, never ??? We don't even have the choice of Cable, because we are too far "out in the sticks".

Beryl, WINDSOR, England

Without knowing what, precisely, is being measured, the published figures are largely meaningless.

My modem reports that I get around 7.5Mb/s most of the time, and my ISP, Demon, can certainly serve that up for sustained periods of time -- but only when I'm downloading things like software updates from their own mirrors.

Most of the time, most users will be visiting popular, and therefore heavily loaded sites, and the bottlenecks may well be further upstream than their local loop, and quite possibly out of control of their ISP.

Ian Kemmish, Biggleswade, UK

RE Jon Mitchell's example; it is completely faulted logic and it is not analogous to the problem. A better car analogy would be to say that a car is advertised as accelerating from 0-60mph in n seconds. If you bought the car and found that 99% of the time you could only get it to go from 0-60 in n+15 seconds then I think that you would have a right to feel misled/cheated.

Ed, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

I am on the Sky Max package, with speeds "up to" 16Mbps, the fastest I have received is 11.7Mbps (which I'm happy with) but if I download something from America or New Zealand the speed is understandably much lower, also if you were to upload from my computer you could only receive it at 600Kbps as that is as fast as my upload speed is.

Joe, Hailsham, East Sussex

SImple solution: if you live in an area where cable is available, take that option. Cable internet speeds are, in my experience, as advertised.

paul jenkins, stoke-on-trent,

I resell Tiscali and Entanet , both who clain up to 8mb connections. Given that our are business internet lines, you would think that they ought to be somewhat better quality, however I doub't if our average is much above 3mb

Simon, Stafford, UK

Broadband ISPs are not doing anything wrong in my opinion. They advertise that they supply " up to" figures. The figures entirely depend on many factors, distance from the exchange to your home, quality of cabling between the exchange and your home and the number of people simultaneously connected to your exchange. None of these factors are within the control of the ISP. The fact is if you live near to an exchange and your cabling is 100% good and you do not attempt to get max speeds at peak times of the day you will get the speeds advertised by the ISP.

This is just a simple case of people misunderstanding what they are dealing with. For example: 'My car is designed to go for 10,000 miles between services', should I complain to the manufacturer because I have to put petrol in once a week?

Jon Mitchell, Farnham, Surrey

It's great to see Which? raising awareness of The Great Broadband Con in the UK. I hope to see action taken against the ISPs falsely claiming to deliver high capacity broadband when in reality the service they provide is frequently far from the advertised max rate.

Spencer Jones, Warrington, UK

BT Broadband. BT indicate that I am receiving 1.1 Mps,,yet I find it impossible to watch a video stream at 400kps due to picture and sound break up. How can the customer contact BT by letter to complain?. BT never give an address on any communications. Surely this practice is illegal. What are other customers views on this matter ?

F Buckley, Warrington, England

ADSL is a very clever way of squeezing a quart into a pint pot. Tthe weak link in the chain in the UK is invariably the last link in the chain i.e. the twisted pair of copper wires between your exchange and your home.

BT still enjoy what is essentially a monopoly on providing and maintaining the final link, despite all the so-called deregulation (LLU unbundling ) but they have yet to find a way to fund the investment required to deal with this final link. If you are lucky enough to be within say a mile of the exchange that serves you you will see something like 5-7 meg rates, but until line quality drastically improves by using fibre ALL THE WAY to homes, forget about decent quality video/audio on demand for all. Too expensive? Well now, look at Korea, look at Japan. Actually, bite your lip and look at France as well, we are really very behind all of them as we mutter about 8 megs, they are all providing economical connectivity at data rates 10X higher.

ED, london,

Virgin Media offer 1 mbps and its usually only aquarter of that speed and then when you tell them its because other users are using too much capacity or the fault of BT.. its a lie they tell us to sign up and the OFT or whoever should be dealing with these crooks and cheats.

Mark lockyer, Somerset, UK

I am with Orange currenty and the speed varies drastically from morning to evening. During early hours of the day I am able to get upto 5.6 Mbps and during evening around 1.5 Mbps..though my broadband is supposed to be 8 Mbps !!. If the supplier cannot support huge traffic and maintain the speed ..they should not advertise 8 Mbps !!

John, Bournemouth, Dorset

i have blueyonder broadband and they tell me i have been upgraded to the super duper speed 20meg, i get 4.7, it costs £25 a month when they upgraded me from 2meg to 4meg i thought hey double the speed for the same money now i realise they should have halved my payments.

francis, wigan, england

"I was offered 'up to 16mbps' but one call to BT told me the line would not support more than 2.7."

Yeah, but should you have to ring up everytime something is not set in stone, but given a estimated value.

Being offered upto 16mbps and then getting 14 is not too bad, but some of the cases are like having a taxi driver say a tenner will get you about 10 miles, and then having him drop you off 10 metres down the road!

Jamie, Halifax, West Yorkshire

Here in Spain, if you apply for 3, 6 or 20 meg the ISP refuses to supply it on the advice of Telefonica , if they cannot achieve it.
UK suppliers should be forced to say what can be received.

Dave Madley, Alicante, Spain

ISPs are the biggest fraudsters on the planet. It is no different here in Holland where I live. Demon , my ISP, are a joke organization who are permanently in denial about the appalling service they offer. It's time the EU took steps to bring ISPs in line with other organizations and enforce consumer laws on them all, in every country. They install crap modems that crash on a regular basis and then blame your modem that was working fine previously. They assume, wrongly, I'm an MIET, that their users are ignorant and that they can snow us with lies. They hide behind bogus fair use claims that they think we can’t see through.
If the TV industry fell short of their advertised performance to the extent that ISP’s do there would be uproar. Imagine if the BBC or Sky provided black and white standard definition programmes that went black and silent for a few minutes ever hour or so on their new HD television channels what the reaction would be; yet ISPs do the equivalent of just that.

David Hughes, Aalsmeer, The Netherlands

So what does this prove, people are unhappy because they didn't read the small print or are to stupid to comprehend signal loss down a long and/or degraded length of copper wire. Don't complain about something that cannot be avoided without digging your street up/moving closer to the exchange AND that you have been warned about already!!

What this article should have pointed out is that the ADSL structure in this country is not keeping up with the demand for fast internet, we are lagging behind in the bandwidth and speed race, if people want fast services wherever they are the thing to push for is a nationwide fibreoptic infrastructure. The problem is people don't understand that with slow broadband speeds there normally is no one to blame and therefore no one to fix it.

Mark Baguley, Dilham, Norfolk

not so true David, it has been known for people to be told by BT they can only get 2.7 on their line they swap supplyers and find they can infact get much more, sometimes maybe even double

Mike, Berkshire, England

A number of factors effect delivered broadband speed, some of which are, and some of which are not in the hands of ISPs. They do not for instance control how far a house is from an exchange, or the quality of the wires to and inside our houses. However there are clear differences between ISPs, and these are due to factors that ISPs make no effort to bring to the attention of users. Your connection to the internet goes through your telephone line to the exchange. At this point it is SHARED by a sometimes LARGE number of other subscribers. The bet is that not all of them will be using the net at once so the extra capacity isnt needed, but with peer to peer or voip so widespread, this doesnt hold true any more. Very often 50 or 200 people share the same connection. Lack of spending on other (shared) resources past the "DSLAM" end stuff also have an impact. Many ISPs have much lower levels of sharing, or better solutions. If these dont it is their fault and its good they are named.

S Hubble, Readin,

Couldn't agree more. When I upgraded from 2meg to 8meg with BT, I was told that my maximum linespeed was 6.5meg, but I have never, ever seen speeds as fast as that. Most of the time (ie 95% of the time) it's no faster then when I was on the 2meg tariff. Just occasionally, it gets up to 3-4 meg, but that's as fast as it gets.

Doesn't stop BT from charging the full amount every quarter, though.

Bill Roberts, Pencoed,

Caveat emptor! In my experience the advertising says "UP TO xMbps". If the punter took the trouble to ring BT (or whoever is their landline supplier they would be told the maximum bandwidth capacity of their line.

I was offered 'up to 16mbps' but one call to BT told me the line would not support more than 2.7.

David Garfield, London, UK