Team Partners Telecommunications

How Fast is Your Flow?

Posted on Oct 02, 2017  | Tags: voip, VoIP, broadband, internet

Turn on a tap in your bathroom and you’ll soon have a pretty good idea of how much water you’re getting and the pressure you’re getting it at. Experience will probably tell you how long it will take for that flow to fill a bath (remember them?), and that if the washing machine is on whilst you’re having a shower you’ll freeze...or not, depending on your circumstances. But here’s the point, can you say the same for your broadband?

The answer is, probably not, at least not so easily, and whilst, in the main, we know how to start complaining if our water flow is hopeless or our mains gas supply fails, we don’t feel so confident about complaining when the next film we want to watch takes hours to download, or our photos the same sort of time to upload. Perhaps it’s because we don’t know what we should consider acceptable, or that we can’t remember what our Broadband supplier promised in terms of speed, or that we didn’t understand that promise anyway. Whatever the reason what’s happened is that customer care in the Internet world is perceived to have fallen behind what’s considered acceptable with other utilities.

So now broadband is a utility? Yes, why not? And the more we think about it that way the less we’re going to allow our service provider to get away with empty promises and lousy speeds.

The reason we’re highlighting this topic is that a group of MPs from all parties have published a report calling on the Government to introduce secondary legislation (i.e. legislation that supports what’s already in place) that will penalise providers for shoddy service and inadequate speeds. The report “Broadband 2.0” claims that nearly seven million of us in the UK may not be able to download at or above the Government’s minimum speed of 10megabits per second (as defined by this year’s Digital Economy Act) and that less than half of us receive what are currently deemed as being superfast speeds of 24 megabits per second.

Now we have your attention, what next? Well, our MP friends, known collectively as the British Infrastructure Group, BIG (t’s true!) are “pushing for a Universal Service Obligation and on Ofcom, the industry regulator, to consider how customers can be efficiently compensated when they fail to receive the speeds that they pay for.” Ofcom, in turn is claiming that they’re on the case, “taking firm, wide-ranging action to protect customers - including new plans for automatic compensation, faster repairs and installations, and ensuring providers commit to giving accurate speed information to customers.”

All of which is good news, because we’re in total support of anything that improves broadband speed and customer service. What you can do right now is get in touch with us and ask us to check the broadband speeds you’re receiving at the moment. Then we can help you to decide the speed you really need, and then we probably supply it and at a competitive price too. Why not give us a ring?