Consumer broadband developments April 2017
There has been a significant focus on consumer broadband performance and service delivery this month.
Ofcom published findings from its first Comparing Service Quality report, showing how different providers rate for answering customer calls, handling complaints and the reliability of their services. This follows on from the findings of Ofcom’s Digital Communications Review that improvements were needed in quality of service across the telecoms industry; Ofcom has committed to reporting at least annually on providers’ service quality. In a related speech Ofcom Chief Executive Sharon White commented that:
“…while people tend to shop around on price, or for a particular product they like, they do not tend to make choices based on customer service; which means operators can get away with poor service. And millions of consumers, particularly vulnerable and elderly people, don’t shop around at all. This has created a widening gulf between consumer expectations and what the industry is actually delivering.”
At the same time Ofcom published its annual report on home broadband performance, comparing the performance of 19 popular broadband packages from seven internet providers. The average UK broadband download speed reached 36.2Mbit/s in November 2016 – an increase of 7.3Mbit/s (25%) since November 2015. The average UK upload speed was 4.3Mbit/s in November 2016, an increase of 0.6Mbit/s (16%) over the previous year. Ofcom also found that the speeds offered by providers are not consistent throughout the day, and can fall significantly during busy periods: 31% of lines had a peak-time (8pm-10pm) average actual speed below 10Mbit/s, an improvement on 2015 when the figure was 40%.
Which? launched its Fix Bad Broadband campaign to highlight issues with and improve the quality of consumer broadband services. The campaign includes a free broadband speed checker and a broadband complaint tool to enable customers to make a formal complaint to their provider quickly and easily. Which? also published findings from its latest broadband customer satisfaction survey; the survey of 1,800 broadband users found big variations in levels of service, value for money, speed and reliability and found that the four biggest providers – Talk Talk, BT, Sky and EE – who collectively have a 72% market share, all score poorly.
uSwitch published findings from a survey of more that 2,000 adults which found that a quarter of employees (25%) have experienced issues with their broadband or mobile services over the last year when working at home, with half of those (46%) experiencing such severe problems that they have been put off from working from home again: “The most common complaint amongst home working internet customers was having broadband speeds simply too slow for them to work effectively (32%), while one in five (18%) have suffered from an intermittent connection. A third of mobile users (32%) complained that their reception was patchy, while one in ten (11%) couldn’t get any reception in their home.”
At the end of last month the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) announced it is scoping a review of how the term “fibre” should be used to describe broadband services. It is currently used in advertising to describe both part-fibre and full-fibre broadband services. The ASA also noted that the Government’s recently published Digital Strategy made clear “its commitment to invest in full-fibre broadband infrastructure, which is likely to make those services available to significantly more people, and also made clear its view that the term ‘fibre’ should only be used to describe full-fibre broadband services”; this issue has also been flagged in recent Parliamentary debates.
