The first results of Analysys Mason’s pan-European telecoms and media consumer survey, The Connected Consumer: a survey of telecoms and media usage, are in: responses from 4000 consumers across four different countries produced 724 000 data points. One of the first things that caught our attention was the indifference of the British consumer to their broadband experience.
Real-world broadband speeds in Great Britain are on average 63–76% of advertised levels
Each year, it seems that another country’s government realises that the broadband speeds received by the populace are not those advertised by the service providers operating in the country. Usually, an enquiry is launched, tighter regulations are implemented by advertising standards agencies and regulators monitor the situation. In the UK, many service providers advertise their Internet offerings as having a downstream bandwidth ‘up to’ a certain number of megabits per second. The UK regulator, Ofcom, published a review at the end of July 2009 that confirmed what we knew already: being promised a certain speed and actually getting that speed are different things.
Our own data, gathered during August 2009 from an online nationally representative panel of 1099 British respondents, gave results similar to those of Ofcom – on average, the British consumer receives real-world broadband speeds that are 66% of those advertised, although there is some disparity between the experience of cable-based and DSL-based customers, as shown in Figure 1.1 On average, subscribers to cable-modem services fared better than DSL subscribers: cable subscribers’ broadband speed was 76% of that advertised, while DSL subscribers’ connections were 63% as fast as those advertised. Around 6% of respondents claimed to be receiving speeds above the maximum bandwidth advertised for their services, suggesting that not all consumers are fully aware of the specifications of their broadband services to begin with.
Figure 1: The proportion of the advertised broadband speed received by subscribers in Britain, by access technology, August 2009 [Source: Analysys Mason, 2009]
The impact of this on overall customer satisfaction is not very significant
The mismatch between real-world broadband bandwidth and the ‘up to’ speeds advertised by ISPs confirms what many of us already know: the DSL family of broadband technologies is more susceptible to interference than cable and hence actual speeds are often much lower than advertised ones. Local loops are not shielded in the same manner as the coaxial cable in hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) deployments – therefore the longer the local loop, the slower the DSL. What may be news to stakeholders in broadband services is that, at present, this doesn’t seem to have the significant impact on overall customer satisfaction that one might expect.
As shown in Figure 2, there is a broad correlation between overall customer satisfaction and the real-world performance of customers’ Internet connections, in terms of downstream bandwidth. A satisfaction score of 1 is labelled ‘unsatisfied’, while a score of 5 is labelled ‘very satisfied’.
Figure 2: Overall customer satisfaction relative to the percentage of headline downstream bandwidth achieved [Source: Analysys Mason, 2009]
Customer satisfaction levels among consumers who receive 20% or less of the anticipated downstream bandwidth are understandably low, but among those who receive over 20% of the advertised downstream speed there is very little variance. Satisfaction levels vary by 0.8 units – between 2.9 and 3.7 out of 5 – reinforcing the conclusions that we drew following the release of Ofcom’s Consumer experience of broadband performance report at the beginning of 2009.2
- By and large, people understand the limitations of what they are buying. They understand that the maximum speed available in their area is dependent on how close they are to an exchange, and/or how many people are online in their area at any time.
- Speed does not matter that much, as long as the application works satisfactorily. For many Internet applications, 3.6Mbit/s (the average speed reported in Ofcom’s January 2009 report) provides a perfectly reasonable user experience for contemporary applications.
- Both Ofcom’s survey and that of Analysys Mason may also indicate something that many of us have long suspected – that British people are not very good at complaining.
As take-up of bandwidth-critical applications continues, the issue of bandwidth performance will have an increasing impact on customer satisfaction. IPTV (although there is little true IPTV in the UK at present) is the most demanding of these applications, requiring guaranteed speeds; if those speeds cannot be delivered reliably, then the service becomes unusable. Over-the-top video services, such as the BBC iPlayer, also require around 3.5Mbit/s to stream high-definition content – a requirement that is only just below the national average speed mentioned in Ofcom’s January 2009 report.
As this article is published, our survey results from the French market are arriving in-house for analysis. They may indicate that bandwidth is already a more-significant factor in customer satisfaction in this market – IPTV has a far higher penetration in France. Back in Great Britain, at least, it appears that broadband speed is not yet as much of a problem as some players in the industry would argue.
1 Note that our results for British consumers do not include those from respondents from Northern Ireland.
2 For more information, see Wood, R., Ofcom’s survey of UK broadband speeds shows that demand is not far ahead of supply, Analysys Mason (Cambridge, 2009).