When you sign up to a broadband deal you’ll find suppliers will be trying to entice you with promises of ‘super-fast’ download speeds, but how accurate are these numbers they’re spouting?

Firstly, take notice of the words immediately before the numbers – are they talking about ‘up to 20 Mbps’?  Any number under 20 can be ‘up to’ – even 1!

There’s nothing more frustrating that sitting waiting while a website downloads, simply because it has a lot of information to process.  If you’ve had website download crash because the system gave up due to the slow download speed you’ll know what we’re talking about.

When clients (who are not on our broadband service) experience problems they often call us up to complain about their ‘system not working’ and I wouldn’t like to repeat some of the comments when we explain that it’s their broadband download speed.

Ofcom has a voluntary code of practice that says suppliers should be more realistic and provide more information encompassing the average speed you can expect.  However, this means that, if you ask, you may be given an average speed of ‘between 3-8 Mbps’.  Realistically, this probably means that, most of the time, you’ll be operating on about 5Mbps.

If you think your broadband  is impersonating a tortoise rather than a cheetah, let’s have a chat and see if we can speed things up a bit.