The results echo findings from a study carried out earlier this year by Ofcom in conjunction with technical partner Samknows, which showed that actual broadband speeds in the UK are also substantially below advertised speeds – and consumer expectations.

According to the report from Telecompaper, the average download speed achieved in the Netherlands is 8.98 Mbps, compared to an average speed offered by the ISPs of 14.9 Mbps. Previous Telecompaper studies found the average actual download speed was 4.95 Mbps in December 2008, and 2.8 Mbps in November 2006. But while speeds have been improving in leaps and bounds, the gap between the service being advertised and the consumer’s experience has been maintained.

The tests were carried out by iPing’s software installed on the consumers’ computers, which automatically checks the speed of broadband. More than 2 million tests on 20,000 users were generated over the three month period from July to September. Owing to the set-up, the speed test checks the actual speed perceived by the end-user, which may include other factors like the wireless connection from the router to the home computer, explains Ed Achterberg, senior research analyst with Telecompaper and author of the report.

Many households in the Netherlands have a broadband connection in the utility closet – a point where services like gas, electricity and telephone lines enter the property. From that point the signal is delivered over a wireless network, and can be affected by the position of the computer in the house, and even by the type of concrete from which the building is constructed, he says.

Alex Salter from Samknows commented:

“I would stress that the only way to accurately measure a broadband provider’s performance is by running tests 24×7 whilst there is no other traffic from the home network. Only then are you actually testing the ISP rather than an individual’s home network, which may be being used by someone else in the house.”

Faster on fibre

One of the interesting things about the Dutch broadband study is that it collects speed data about fibre-to-the-home connections for the first time. Fibre lines achieved the best average download speed in the study by quite a wide margin, 40 Mbps, followed by cable with 14.43 Mbps and DSL with 5.81 Mbps. Fibre and cable also achieved the highest average performance ratios, delivering respectively 62 percent and 65 percent of average offered speeds, while DSL averaged just 55 percent of advertised speeds.

But wait a minute, isn’t fibre supposed to deliver the maximum speed available on the line? In this case it doesn’t appear to, and that could be related to the fact that the tests are performed at the computer. “We know that some providers deliver the maximum speed that is included in the package, but that’s not always received on the PC or desktop,” says Achterberg.

In Achterberg’s opinion, service providers need to be aware that the service they deliver depends on elements in the complete chain, which are outside their control but that impact upon the perception of the performance. Therefore, poor in-home wiring, or a badly positioned router or modem could be the undoing of a fibre-to-the-home users experience.

If you’re Dutch, then you may be interested in the fact that, like the UK study, cable operators seem to come out on top – at least as far as download speeds are concerned (upload and latency were not measured). Ziggo is most likely to provide speeds close to those advertised in the low-end segments of 0-1.5 Mbps and 1.5-3 Mbps, as well as in the 6-12 Mbps segment, according to the study. Meanwhile, UPC was most likely to deliver at high speeds, coming first in the 12-24 Mbps, 24-48 Mbps and 48+ Mbps segments, and tying with Tele2 for the best performance in the 3-6 Mbps segment.

This story also appeared on www.samknows.com.

For those of you who haven’t come across it yet, Samknows was set up in 2003 to provide campaigners in the UK with the information needed to bring broadband to their area. It was instrumental in aggregating demand for broadband services, which was important in the early days of first-generation broadband when BT set “trigger levels” for exchange activation.

Now that all of the telephone exchanges have been converted to ADSL, the focus of Samknows has necessarily changed to providing services, in particular a project with Ofcom to create a method of benchmarking ISPs. This work resulted in a well-publicised report earlier this year that provided hard evidence on a topic that consumers had been complaining about for some time — namely that broadband speeds aren’t exactly “as advertised”.

Samknows is now looking at other applications for its broadband monitoring platform, and has tweaked the technology to meet the needs of ISPs that wish to measure their own performance. UK cable operator Virgin Media has appointed Samknows to conduct an independent trial; Samknows’ plan is to expand its broadband monitoring business to other ISPs and beyond the UK.

The news at www.samknows.com is intended to add context to the solutions that the company provides. For the latest updates, you can follow Samknows on Twitter. And if you have some hot story leads, please get in touch!