Darren Watt

Finally! I’m out of contract with my ISP, who shall remain nameless - and were until recently quite good, but are now rubbish. This means I can switch ISP for nothing, rather than pay them admin fees in excess of sixty quid(!?) yesterday and then leave. That’s good news for me.

The whole “Up to 8Mb” broadband argument that Watchdog is getting irate about is mainly a bunch of bollocks - I understand that ISPs are unable to guarantee download speeds, but they should be able to give you an indication of achievable rates and charge you a percentage accordingly. They could do this… but they never will, because they need to keep their costs down by having standard charges and having indecipherable Call Center staff in India, which I fully believe is to dissuade you from calling them.

No doubt my next ISP will be just as bad, but at least I’ll get an interesting new freeview box, phone and er, homehub to play with.

Much has been said recently on broadband performance and the problem with ISP’s flogging “Up to 8Mb!” connections, then supplying much less. They went into it during The Gadget Show, and no doubt Watchdog has ranted about it with their usual hysteria.

My broadband at the start of the year was fine, bit up and down at times, but over the last week it was reduced to a crawl. Running an online speed test I was told I was able to achieve the dizzy download speeds of 12Kb/sec. No, hang on, that’s like the old days…

I finally got round to complaining - not overly stressed out, but logged a tech call with the ISP. Lo and behold! Speeds now running at 6Mbps which is far better than anything I’ve ever got previously. Which is great, and I’m not going to complain that if they can do 6mbps then why hasn’t it always been that quick, that would be a different rant altogether.

The moral of this, obviously: Don’t be English about it - complain, and if your ISP is any good they’ll get onto it for you. Otherwise, switch.

See.