By Natasha Lomas, 23 October 2008 16:14
NEWS
'Unlimited' broadband services continue to baffle UK consumers.
Around nine out of 10 broadband users don't understand the limitations on their service, research conducted by YouGov for price comparison website uSwitch.com has found.
While 'unlimited' broadband services tend to have fair usage policies enabling service providers to penalise heavy users by, for instance, restricting their bandwidth during peak hours, the majority of UK broadband consumers remain unsure about exactly how limited their 'unlimited' service really is.
Some 6.2 million UK broadband customers wrongly believe they have a truly unlimited broadband service, according to the survey, and a further 7.5 million do not know what their limit is - making a total of 13.7 million confused customers.
The UK has more than 16 million broadband connections in total.
The survey found six of the nine broadband providers it looked at still use the term 'unlimited' - yet do set limits on their packages, while just two of the providers publicise their official limits. The majority of providers are also prepared to cut off excessive users, the research found.
The research also discovered a sizeable minority - estimated at one million - of Blighty's fat pipe consumers have nearly reached or exceeded their limit in the last year alone.
The nine ISPs covered by the survey are AOL, Be, BT, Orange, PlusNet, Sky, Tiscali, Toucan and Virgin Media. The research is based on responses from 11,870 UK adults.
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1. anonymous
Much is talked about regarding limits on broadband but even this article does not disclose the whole picture. Commonly, in the press, we are told about not being able to achieve the quoted (maximum) access rate and this is latched onto by the uneducated non-technical press as the only problem with broadband. There are also the discussions like this one about download limits and this is relatively common knowledge (despite this survey) and hits the press periodically. However, the more devious limit that service providers regularly use is not reported on; maybe because no one wants to open the bigger Pandora box on ethics and even contractual obligations. This limit is the throttling of customer throughput, not seen by physical indications such reduced access speeds but performed on customer traffic levels. In essence, it simply looks like the Internet is running slowly and we all expect that. The reason service providers do this is simply to preserve their network from unpredictable overload and this can happen often, typically every day at peak times, because service providers do not provision sufficient bandwidth to carry consumer Internet traffic. This is understandable in a world where consumer prices for this service are driven lower and lower and profits still must be made by the SP. However, this should still be made known to the consumer; otherwise it will be seen as dishonest and will undoubtedly bite the service providers in the not too distant future.