O2 enters broadband top five

O2, which launched its broadband service last October, has been nominated as one of the top five best performing consumer ADSL broadband providers in the UK.

The broadband provider was ranked third in terms of technical performance in the second half of 2007, just behind Plusnet, in Epitiro's ADSL Internet Performance Indicator (IPI) Report. The broadband benchmarking company said BT sustained its position at the top of the table, which it held all last year, with Tiscali and Orange completing the top five.

O2 has taken on board the need to give consumers clarity about the speed of their broadband connections, one of the main thrusts of Computeractive’s Crystal Clear broadband campaign. The internet service provider commented on the the push for clear information about the actual broadband speed consumers are likely to receive.

It told Computeractive that one of its priorities was to ensure that its customers received the speeds they were promised.

Gavin Johns, Epitiro’s Managing Director said: “While many customers are choosing their service provider on price alone, an increasing number seem to be choosing their service on download speeds, and judging their selection of company on crude online speed tests.

“Both approaches could lead to disappointment. It’s important to remember that download speed is just one indicator of broadband performance. Other factors such as the reliability and quality of the network connection are just as important as speed when judging an internet service.”

The IPI is the result of six months of technical testing using Epitiro’s ISP-I (pronounced “eye spy”) technology.

ISP-I conducts tests of the largest 11 competing ADSL broadband providers every 15 minutes from the end-users’ perspective. The data collected provides detailed figures on the speed and reliability of internet connections, and performance of essential internet qualities such as download, upload, ping and domain name service (DNS) performance.

The data is then collated to compile the top five rankings. The report only compares internet services based on competing ADSL technologies, including ADSL Max and ADSL 2+. As cable technologies use different network equipment, and are not available nationwide, they are not included in the comparison.

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!