The 40M product has an "average" speed of 36M, so things haven't really changed from "up to 38M".

Presumably the reason the average is so high is due to a large proportion of people who are close enough to the cabinet to benefit from the 80M product, but choose to take 40M to save £5 per month. (And who can blame them? A rock-solid 40/10M is very usable for most households)

But it hides the long tail of users whose maximum achievable speed is much less than 40M.

ok thanks, although I am just going to say, average speeds on FTTP products people would need to be educated somehow the meaning is just related to congestion rather than access line speed as well.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

To me the advantage of FTTP over FTTC is not so much the higher max possible speeds, but more that the access speed is guaranteed and one no longer has to worry about the horrors of interleaving.

There's also the advantage of not having to worry about a MODEM, SNR or REIN

Average speeds on FTTP versus FTTC for same product description FTTP does win, but the WiFi many use mean its not always as high as you would think

Bingo - and covered it all in the news and possibility too that providers may be slightly skewing things to shorter lines or doing so without even realising.

Example of how ISP can play game, new 40/10 service from BT Consumer now

As AAISP Adrian Kennard has said he can easily give everyone the average speed, just create a product specific to every customer, so the average is just their average

Its not hard to see why the national average is high on 40mbit FTTC, FTTC doesnt push lines as hard as adsl2+ as an example.

I have always maintained that advertised speeds shouldnt be national based but instead local based. For both xDSL and cable.

I checked VMs website and their claimed average speeds seem really interesting, either they have done a lot of fixing of their network since ofcom's last reported figures, or something fishy is going on. Speed complaints on VMs website do seem to have tumbled tho compared to even 2 years ago.

In what way would local speed averages help with advertising broadband?
The nature of DSL and the way the OpenReach network is made up you can have 10Mb in 1 street and 80Mb in the next street.

Virgin hub areas and OpenReach exchange areas in no way match regional TV coverage areas either.

That just couldn't be implemented.

"Up to" wasn't great, but it worked. The average nonsense makes no sense.

depends on the area.

I would say it helps more with cable than xDSL tho, as it least with DSL you have providers providing an estimated speed which virgin media do not have to do. Virgin media I feel really needs to have a local average speed requirement, you could define local to be cabinet based or node based. I also feel it should be an average of peak time, not 24/7 average. For DSL I still prefer average to "up to" simply because even if its only a little bit, it skews the advertised speed downwards, and anything that moves it down is a good thing as FTTP providers need more tools to advertise that the technology is superior.

Local estimates would be in much smaller areas than TV regions, TV regional areas would be still be too big to skew poor performing local areas.

Sometimes you just have to take "any" improvement even if it still has flaws.

Edited by Chrysalis (Tue 19-Jun-18 12:57:24)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

I checked VMs website and their claimed average speeds seem really interesting, either they have done a lot of fixing of their network since ofcom's last reported figures, or something fishy is going on. Speed complaints on VMs website do seem to have tumbled tho compared to even 2 years ago.

I think they use speed test data from the samknows whitebox program, which in fact I think OFCOM insist all providers based there advertised speeds on.

As this is a heavily multi threaded test, VM comes off quite well. Even I can get 380+mbit day and night from Steam, Newsgroups, Speedtest.net. It's only single source downloads like HTTP downloads, and the speedtest on this site that suffer badly.

NOTE: Current DSL signups estimates are based on connection speeds, i.e. do not take into account peak time impact.

For joe or jane average the winner is cable broadband which is the only one to have increased their speeds, so why the need for FTTP lets all sign up for cable.