Brits losing out on broadband speed

According to a new report from TalkTalk, many UK citizens are losing out on broadband speed due to the poor set up of their connection.

Indeed, the ISP reckons that around 500,000 households are dropping something like 4Mbps of broadband speed, on average, which is quite a substantial loss. And that loss stems from very basic errors which are prevalent across the country.

Some folks haven’t even fitted an ADSL filter to their line, in fact, TalkTalk found that 14 per cent of the 25,000 households it surveyed had failed to have this basic piece of equipment in place. A broadband connection runs much more slowly minus a filter, and is also subject to more flakiness and drop outs.

13 per cent didn’t have their router (or modem) connected to the master phone socket, rather to an extension socket, and 17 per cent needed the phone socket properly set up.

One in five folks needed their router either reconfiguring, or to be set up full-stop. However, the highest percentage of speed loss was seen through poor cabling, which 31 per cent of those surveyed suffered from.

All this just goes to show that despite the growth in net connected homes, and devices such as smartphones, the UK still needs educating on the basics of technology such as using ADSL filters.

According to Recombu, TalkTalk “Bright Sparks” engineer Dan Downham commented: “You can lose anything up to 4 megabits per second of speed simply due to a poor in home set up. When you consider that the average home gets a broadband speed of 7.6 megabits per second, that’s an awful lot of bandwidth going to waste.

“People need to think of broadband in the same way as water and electricity. It’s a commodity that can go to waste if you’re not careful.”