New service to rank consumer broadband services

BT has come top of a new quarterly consumer ADSL broadband report launched by customer care provider, Epitiro.

Epitiro said its benchmarking report, known as ISP-I, will monitor the ADSL service from all the UK's leading consumer internet service providers (ISPs), but currently does not include cable connections.

The firm, which normally sells its data to ISPs, uses software that connected to services every 15 minutes from 10 key locations in the UK.

This will check ISPs by performance including connection rates, connection failures as well as upload and download speeds. Using these criteria, Epitiro will rank the top five ISPs for each quarter.

However it does not monitor customer service levels, pricing or additional services to rank the ISPs.

The first report for the period April to June 2006, has identified BT as being in pole position followed by Virgin, Demon, AOL and Orange.

BT, Virgin and AOL were the fastest services to connect, while Pipex, Orange and BT were up to four times faster than the industry average in delivering email.

Gavin Johns, Managing Director of Epitiro said, "Our consumer ADSL testing found that in terms of Internet performance, BT topped the overall rankings.. [it] was also found to provide the fastest service as a percentage of its theoretical maximum."

The aim of the quarterly report said the company is to give consumers some idea of the resilience of the internet and internet services deliver by ISPs so they can choose a fast, reliable service.