Broadband ISPs 'mislead' public

Internet providers have been accused of misleading the public over broadband speeds, following the results of a survey of more than 18,500 customers.

Comparison site Broadband-Expert.co.uk claims that despite many ISPs promoting 8Mbps connections, UK broadband users only get an average download speed of 2.95Mbps.

William Harvey, technical director at Broadband-Expert.co.uk, said: “Despite ongoing pressure from Ofcom and various consumer groups, broadband providers are still misleading the public over broadband speeds.”

"Current advertising campaigns like the one for Tiscali promise superfast broadband (download) speeds of up to 8Mbps. Yet Tiscali came bottom of our test results with an average actual download speed of just 1.72Mbps. Now that is not superfast by any stretch of the imagination and is over 1Mbps lower than the UK average."

However, a spokeswoman for Tiscali has said the ISP is keen to see how Broadband-Expert.co.uk produced its data and how large its sample size of Tiscali customers was.

The spokeswoman said: “It is unfortunate that Broadband Expert decided to single out Tiscali for criticism, but their findings are not consistent with other recent (and sustained) findings. Two recent reports place Tiscali in the top five for performance and both have reported Tiscali’s prior consistency.”

Last week, measurement company Epitiro released its latest rankings of ISPs in the UK monitoring factors such as ping rates, upload and download speeds and DNS (domain name server) performance. Tiscali ranked in the top five alongside BT, PlusNet, O2 and Orange.

For the results of the Broadband-Expert.co.uk speed test, click on the 'Speed Test Results' tab towards the bottom of this page.