Broadband Speed & Quality - Our Commitment to You

At the end of July 2010 OFCOM, the telecoms regulator, announced a voluntary code of conduct for ISPs supplying broadband. This was done after many suppliers were found supplying ADSL at speeds well below the 'up to' advertised speed however, there are aspects that OFCOM's voluntary new code of conduct misses, so we have taken their proposal and added some additional aspects to ensure that our customers understand what they will get for the money that they pay.

As a responsible ISP and provider of IT solutions, we have never tried to sell something as something it's not.

• Our ADSL pages clearly state that all our services are supplied at the fastest speed that your line will support and any one wanting to know a predicted speed for their service should contact us first and we will be happy to tell them.
• We monitor every ADSL line for latency and speed every second your line is connected. This enables us to be proactive about ensuring your broadband experience is the best that it can be, based on the quality of your phone line and distance from the exchange.
• We will take speed and quality fault reports seriously. We will consider the access speed (DSL sync) and BRAS rate (in BT) 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 the matter within 30 days you can immediately migrate ADSL 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 analyse our monitoring to identify congestion and quality issues in both the carrier networks and our connections to the carrier networks. We will work closely with carriers to promptly identify and rectify issues in their network by any means necessary.
• We aim that our network is never a cause of any slowdown or bottleneck however, we do buy a 'committed level of bandwidth' from our wholesale carriers. We monitor and manage this very closely, however it is not possible to adjust this level instantly and when we do so, we have to keep this level of capacity for a minimum period. To make matters worse, the bandwidth on these links is very expensive, so it is not always possible or practical to adjust interconnects to accommodate short increases in traffic demands, such as for streamed sporting events or major breaking news. To allow us to handle these situations to ensure that the impact of any congestion is minimised, we use a traffic shaper to drop the largest packets when we hit our bandwidth capacity. This allows us to ensure that small packets such as VoIP and DNS queries keep moving, while streaming traffic or other TCP based data is dropped and requires re-transmitting.

We are looking to be able to provide you with more data about your connection on a 'self service' basis from our portal, however until this data is available like this, please feel free to contact us when ever you wish to request line data or to ask any other question you might have.