Online in the slow lane

What's the deal with ISP download speeds?At first glance, the sleek new 3G modems that mobile phone companies have been promoting heavily in recent months look like an excellent alternative for those unwilling to accept the long lead-in times, high costs and flaky customer service offered by many traditional broadband providers.

You simply buy the modem, plug it into your computer and get instant broadband access at a comparatively low cost. Some of the companies offering the service don't even require you to commit to any class of contract to get your hands on the gizmos.

Vodafone, 02 and 3 claim to offer internet connection speeds of up to 3.4Mb per second (Mbps), which is perfectly respectable and would allow you download an album from iTunes in under 10 minutes.

Chance would be a fine thing. The key words in all the promotional material are "up to" - the reality is that the connection speeds offered by the 3G modems never come close to 3.4Mbps and sometimes struggle to reach a third of the top speed.

The problem of misleading advertising of download and upload speeds is not unique to the mobile phone companies' latest toy. All the broadband providers are guilty, to a greater or lesser degree, of talking up their products and claiming download speeds which are almost impossible to achieve.

Two recent studies in the UK have shown that broadband speeds there are significantly slower than advertised by the internet service providers (ISPs). The most recent survey, from Computeractive magazine, involved 3,000 readers and found that 62 per cent of users got less than half of the top speed advertised by their broadband provider. Nearly one-third said they were getting less than a quarter of their maximum advertised bandwidth.

"This problem has been building for a while, with a growing gulf between what is advertised and what is delivered," said Paul Allen, editor of Computeractive. "The adverts often have super-fast broadband in huge lettering with the 'up to' clause in very small print."

A second survey by consumer group Which?, published last month, echoed the computer magazine's findings and said consumers with services claiming to deliver speeds of up to 8Mbps were actually getting an average speed of 2.7Mbps.

The same problems exist here, and users of Irish bulletin boards can routinely be found complaining about lower than expected download speeds. Many who sign up for broadband packages believing the marketing spin and expecting superfast connections are understandably dismayed to get download rates of less than half what they anticipated.

"I got a '6Mbps download speed option' a couple of weeks ago," writes one contributor to the irishisptest.com forum "and have not seen it rise above 3.2Mbps. I am now wondering if this is just marketing hype or something else? Am I being realistic to expect 6Mbps as an average or have I been conned? The speed is worse during the day."

The answer may be a bit of both. According to Michele Neylon, the CEO of Blacknight Solutions, the hosting company which runs the broadband speed testing site. "There are two sides to it. People are possibly a little gullible and don't read the finer print, but certainly some broadband companies are abusing that fact. I don't think it is really fair to say all broadband companies are taking advantage of people, but there are some who are certainly pushing the limits, and maybe some of the marketing departments need to be reined in," he suggests. "People won't ever get the maximum speed the companies offer. It is almost physically impossible to do that."

Neylon says thousands of speed checks are run by users of his site every week. "If the ISPs start rejigging their prices, we often see a huge surge in activity," he says. Prompted by the studies from the UK, Blacknight is currently carrying out a survey of its own to see how the actual broadband speeds in Ireland compare with the packages consumers signed up to.

Fergal O'Byrne CEO of the Irish Internet Association (IIA) believes [ the communications regulator] ComReg should provide consumers with independent advice about the average connection speeds attained by ISPs. He accepts that it may be a difficult thing to measure and there are variables which are out of the control of all providers - such as atmospheric conditions and how individual homes are wired - but he maintains that the obstacles could be overcome if the will was there.

"I would like to see ComReg have a role. It could draw up a set of clearly defined parameters and publish each month or even each quarter the average speeds attained by all the ISPs. It would certainly shake up the market. As it is, ISPs don't have to stand over their advertised speeds at all."

Pricewatch contacted ComReg to find out if it had any plans to better regulate the marketing of broadband to Irish consumers. A spokesman accepted that ComReg had a role in protecting and informing consumers about electronic communications services.

"With this in mind, ComReg will facilitate a meeting with the Advertising Standards Association of Ireland and National Consumer Agency to review consumer issues in relation to queries raised about broadband speeds." The spokesman said the purpose of the meeting would be "to assess the concerns raised and to decide on an appropriate course of action." He added that to date it had received "a small number of queries about this issue".