Ofcom Tests Favors O2, Slow Broadband Speeds Exposed
It has been a while since Orange was contested by Ofcom for an earlier claim of being the fastest broadband service provider in the UK. Apparently, Ofcom has been busy taking tests in order to back their claims.
After a recent study, it has been revealed by Ofcom that under an 8 Mbps connection, the speed of an Orange connection can go as fast as 3.3 Mbps to 4 Mbps. This was outdone by O2, which had a slightly faster speed of 4.3 Mbps going up to 5 Mbps. Orange UK has contested the results, stating that only a very small sample of their subscribers had been tested and that cannot be used as a gauge for the overall network speed.
Orange UK has been constantly working on improving their services and network capabilities as well as having focused on improving the overall speed of their broadband service. A spokesperson stated that Orange is “disappointed” with Ofcom’s results.
Other broadband networks were also studied by Ofcom, which revealed a rather peculiar result: it appears that broadband speeds are not up to the projected or advertised speeds. According to Ofcom, many subscribers are signing up and paying large amounts of money each month for connection speeds that are nowhere near the speed that they have subscribed to.
This has since called for the need for broadband subscribers to either speed up their networks to match their advertised rates, or to state the actual speed of their service. To the credit of many local service providers, network speeds have been slowly increasing in the recent years. Ofcom’s research covered about 1,500 different households across the UK and conducted over 18 million tests for speed and performance of the broadband services.
It will be a long time before networks are able to standardize speed rates and actual performance of the services. But many believe that the steps that Ofcom is taking are definitely in the right direction.
