Faster Broadband for Britain...But still lacking

[vinnieza]

Broadband is getting faster in the UK but some customers are not reaching the speeds that service providers have advertised, shows a survey.

The average UK broadband download speed is now 2Mbps, up from 512Kbps three years ago, says thinkbroadband.com.

The figures are based on more than a third of a million speed tests carried out by the website's users.

But many people who have been sold "up to 8Mbps" services are still getting substantially slower connections.

"Compared to a couple of years ago the average has gone up," confirmed Andrew Ferguson, editor of thinkbroadband.com.

"But the survey shows that whilst a number of providers are marketing products as an 'up to 8Mbps' service, it is clear that some of them have a fair proportion of customers still on fixed 512kbps, 1Mbps or 2Mbps services."

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While broadband speeds in the UK are set to improve, the country still lags behind Japan and South Korea where speeds of up to 50Mbps are not uncommon.

Mr Ferguson said: "In Japan you will see VDSL services at 50/60Mbps and you think, 'Why can't I have that in Britain?'.

"But in Japan you can roll out whatever you like and you fix problems like interference after. In the UK we like not to have interference."

Faster broadband speeds over telephone lines could potentially lead to interference with radio stations.

The UK regulator wants these problems fixed before the greenlight is given to technologies such as VDSL and VDSL2, which offer tremendous broadband speeds.

Source

[vinnieza]

I did wonder why you hear some countries are getting these really fast speeds but we're only on 8 (more than 5 times slower).

But i guess 50 is probably the fastest over there...maybe in the capital? Whereas the fastest over here is 16/24?

[117]

50Mbps

[fac51]

They have 100mb's in Sweden i believe.

[117]