And paying £4 a month for their broadband...

Given the horrible complexity of actually measuring real world (rather than speedtest site) throughput and difficult in diagnosis this could be massively complex. Just putting it into some contractually enforceable wording is a huge job and not many people would understand the technicalities.

Just off the top of my head, slowdowns can be down to local WiFi congestion, poor household wiring (on xDSL), powerline noise issues, local segment congestion (on cable), local equipment incompatibilities, problems on domestic computers, intermittent faults on copper loops, contention on backhaul from cabinets to PoPs, congestion from PoPs to peering connections, congestion within peering networks, poor performance from end servers, slow DNS servers and hundreds of other things. Working out who is responsible for what is a nightmare, and extracting the required diagnostics yet another. That's even before you start with finding the sort of skilled workforce to sort it out.

I have had a very long career working on very large computer systems, much of it round infrastructure design, capacity planning, performance and analysis. I spent many a long hour working on performance definitions for even apparently simple elements (like enterprise storage infrastructure) and even that was difficult and frustrating, and that's in a relatively controlled environment.

Without getting into the technicalities, there are roughly to approaches to performance. On is using secondary characteristics (basically capacity planning on the basis that if you can remain sufficiently ahead of the demand curve all will be OK) or there is the measurement of primary performance (things like actual latency measurements all the way down an application stack from transactions to disk I/O). The capacity planning process tends to be the approach taken as it's far easier to do in bulk (albeit highly indirect and very broad-brush) and then there's the primary characteristic approach which measures individual performance which is amazing resource-intensive and requires a lot of skilled resource. Trying to micro-manage individual customers with the latter approach is a huge logistical issue, even if backed up with measurement agents. I used to work with major IT systems that, across the enterprise, would quite literally generate 100s of GB of performance analysis data a day just about the performance of the systems. I shudder to think what would be required if anything like this was required for a major ISP.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

... And think of it, any ISP who had adslmax as a punter would be skint in weeks !

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

You can be absolutely sure that one speedtest result will not be enough to trigger a payment.

It would help if Ofcom were to define a procedure whereby a customer could establish whether or not an ISPs performance in terms of bandwidth is adequate or not.

Ofcom should also specify what a customers rights are where performance is inadequate.

Since its still a work in progress it sounds great, if it works and does benefit the end user then even better, just would not like to be a shareholder with Virgin Media

Edited by deleted (Sat 27-Feb-16 16:50:00)

Possible ideas I can think of.

1 - Make openreach have it in their t&c that providers have to pass on any compensation to their customers. Providers dont agree? Then they find someone else not openreach. Problem with this is because end users have no direct contact with openreach, it probably cannot be enforced.
2 - Ofcom start accepting complaints when the policy is breached and fine the CP 10x annual end user subscription as a deterrent for further breaches.

Ofcom dont have a clue alot of the time alot of it is down to that they dont like consumers talking to theml, they make it very hard to send them complaints, instead trying to tell people to contact their own CP or another regulating body.