A third of UK broadband users don’t get promised speeds

Broadband
Share
One third of us don't get advertised broadband speeds
One third of us don’t get advertised broadband speeds. Half of us think speed tests are important

It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone watching the iPlayer on TV/tablet only to find the video buffering every few minutes, but over one third of people don’t get the broadband speeds promised by their provider, according to a survey by the consumer information site ISPreview.co.uk

The survey found that most people (60%) did receive close to or more than the ISP’s estimated speed of their broadband Internet connection, yet 34% didn’t and 6% had no idea whether their provider was delivering the promised performance or not.

The good news is that the vast majority of respondents do at least keep an eye on their broadband performance by conducting regular connection speed tests, with most viewing such testing as being either “very important” (49%) or of “average importance” (41%) to the monitoring of their connection (only 9.5% felt that it was “not important”).

On average, how often do you run a speed test (pick closest)?

Once a Week – 35.8%
Once a Month – 31.5%
Once a Day – 17.8%
Very Rarely / Never – 14.7%

Says ISPreview.co.uk’s Founder, Mark Jackson: “The ability to understand the real-world performance of your broadband connection is useful for both helping to spot faults and identifying whether or not your ISP is delivering the promised performance.”

He adds: “Thankfully most consumers (60%) do receive close to the estimated performance given by their ISP, although clearly the proportion that do not is still far too high.”

The online poll was conducted between 12th October and 16th November 2015 with 1,242 Internet connected readers of the ISPreview.co.uk website

Chris Price
For latest tech stories go to TechDigest.tv