Ofcom Broadband Speeds Code of Practice

What exactly is it? I noticed the other day that it's selected by default in the ISP search, and when I changed it to "Don't mind", the results jumped from 36 to over 100.

I've tried googling it, but I can't make much sense of it. The obvious thing to do would be to treat every ISP that isn't signed up as "dodgy" and ignore them. However, I think it's probably not that simple, especially as it seems the majority aren't signed up.

Thanks.

Hmmmm .

I can't answer the question directly, but if you tell us what sort of thing you are looking for, like download amounts, type of usage, lots or little gaming, and budget, many people will come up with suggestions, with a fairly close agreement.

A very important bit of information is what exchange you are on. If you put your phone number into samknows and post the link to the result, that would be great .

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 09-Jul-10 09:10:19)

In a nutshell it is a code of practise for ISP, to give as much information about the likely speed you will receive before you sign up to the service, so if you are looking at a say up to 24MB package when you contact the ISP they should try to give you information on your likely speeds and what could effect them.

If you need more info have a search on the ofcom web site

(Oh and we are signatories to the code )

Edited by vivaciti (Fri 09-Jul-10 19:26:27)

In reply to a post by vivaciti:

... to give us much information about the likely speed you will receive before you sign up to the service ...

"to give as much ..." .

In that case I won't worry about it, either the ISP give the information or not, whether or not they're signed up doesn't really matter.

What's more important is that the search function seems to have a couple of errors. If you select "No" the results come back 0. If you select "Don't mind" the results should surely be Yes + No (~200 + 0) but actually come out at ~400. Finally, I think there may be some ISP's that are listed on the Ofcom website as having signed up, but don't appear on the search when "Yes" is selected (although I haven't gone through it with a fine tooth comb, so I could be wrong).

The original code was written as a response to the number of complaints that were raised with Ofcom related to the information provided by ISPs to their customers. It is an entirely voluntary code but basically it breaks down to 8 'principles'

1. Training for staff so they provide the correct information to EU about speed and the code
2. Information for the EU at the point of sale about expected speed
3. Accuracy of said information
4. Fixing of speed issues
5. Information presented on Websites
6. Timescales for adoption of the code
7. Monitoring of compliance with code
8. Notification to EU about existence of code

Full version - http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/telecoms/codes-of-p...

The code is currently being rewritten and due for publication later this year