OFCOM recently prepared yet another voluntary code of practice on broadband speed. Once again we feel the code is badly drafted and missed the point in many areas. Whilst we already meet and exceed most areas of their code, there are areas which are impractical or impossible to be technically correct and so we have chosen not sign up to the new OFCOM code. We have instead decided to provide our own code of practice which we feel makes very clear what we will do to address speed and quality of the service we provide to you.
We ensure our staff are trained to understand the services we sell, the commitments we make, and to offer the best advice to individual customers.
If you want to know more, please to check the OFCOM Code of Practice on their web site. One of the key issues is that they define that one in ten broadband lines are faulty. We don't believe one in ten of our lines are faulty and we are surprised at the large ISPs that have signed up the code that must surely agree that one in ten of their lines are faulty. We work to fix faults on lines and do not want any customers with faulty lines.
Our target is to ensure links to carriers are not congested - i.e. we are never the bottleneck. Whilst it is technically impossible to guarantee this, we monitor congestion carefully.
We will use the best information we get from carriers (e.g. BT/TT/CityFibre) to provide speed estimates for your line. We provide a checker on our web site and an estimate whilst ordering. We note the estimate we quoted for your later reference.
We will take speed and quality fault reports seriously. We will consider the access speed (DSL sync) and BRAS rate (in BT/TT) and actual achieved throughput. We will consider packet loss and latency. We will consider previous performance and the original estimates quoted. We will advise you where we think you can improve your equipment or wiring. We will pursue fault reports with carriers where we think they are the cause of a fault. We will rectify faults that are within our control. We will offer any advice we can where there are matters beyond our control. We ask you to give us a chance to rectify issues, but if we cannot resolve any genuine fault within one month you can immediately migrate the DSL service to another provider with no penalty. We don't restrict this offer to the first few months of your service with us.
We will monitor all broadband lines constantly and provide real time and historical information to you for your lines. We will record the line rate (BRAS or sync) and the actual data transfer speeds achieved. We will constantly measure packet loss and latency to asses quality issues and identify and tackle the underlying causes of low speed, not just the symptoms.
We will analyse our monitoring to identify congestion and quality issues in carrier networks. We will publish these clearly. We will work closely with carriers to promptly identify and rectify issues in their network by any means necessary.
We are happy for other ISPs that are not signing up to OFCOMs code of practice on broadband speed to use some or all of these key statements if they wish, as long as they really do believe in them and will follow them. We recognise that not all ISPs have the same levels of line monitoring that we do, but at the very least we know that most ISPs we deal with have the same views and expect to tell customers sensible line speeds and take speed issues seriously.
