Much of the discussion about the Digital Britain report, published a couple of weeks ago, has focused on the Government’s promise to provide universal broadband throughout the UK at a minimum speed of 2mb by 2012.
It felt to me that the majority of commentators said that this suggested speed was far too slow to be of value in creating a truly ’Digital Britain’. After all, plenty of broadband customers already get faster speeds than this. And if we were to compare that to the speeds available in other countries, 2mb broadband would put us way behind countries like South Korea, Japan, France and Germany.
This debate only goes to prove that speed is one of the hottest topics for broadband users.
As we’ve mentioned before on this blog, your broadband speed depends on more factors than solely your distance from the exchange. Clearly, the closer your home is from the exchange, the higher speed you may get on this physical line. However there are a number of important things you can do in your home to improve the speed you receive – in fact the Digital Britain report (see page 54) reckons “self-help” measures would ensure 800,000 households who currently receive less than 2mb broadband could achieve that speed or more.
This is why at TalkTalk we’re committed to helping our customers receive the maximum speed possible, and we are doing everything we can to improve the other factors that truly influence the broadband speed. We know how important this is – whether it be for downloading music, watching video content, or shopping online.
To this end we have invested and will continue to invest heavily in our own next generation network capacity to ensure it can handle the ever-increasing demands made on it and still deliver reliable, fast broadband. It might surprise many people but we have deployed the biggest network in the UK behind BT, and currently 80% of our customers are on it. We think this is crucial to enable us to offer the best service possible, in terms of reliability as well as speed, in addition to great value packages. All our exchanges are connected to our core network through high speed links that we have deployed all over the country and that we monitor constantly. As we control the whole of our network, we have been able to recently optimise all customer lines across our 1700 exchanges, and this has allowed most of our customers to enjoy higher speeds and a more stable broadband experience.
We also think it’s extremely important to be transparent about speed. That’s why we were the first ISP to tell people what real speed they could expect at their home if they signed up to us (Ofcom subsequently made this a standard requirement for all ISPs). And even now we offer a ‘Turbo Boost’ that gives you the fastest speed your line can handle – but if your line can’t go any faster than it is already, we’ll tell you so you don’t waste you money on it.
Because of the critical role the home environment (eg internal wiring) plays in the actual speed that customers can enjoy on their computers, we have plans to help improve customers’ experience in this area – so watch out for my next blog about how you can improve your speed with TalkTalk.
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Terry Stevens