QUOTE(demon148 @ Oct 28 2009, 12:00 PM)
Yes I admit broadband speeds here are much slower than anywhere else. As for SKY they offer a 20mb service, but for most of its package deals they only give you up to 2mb braodband, which I find bad.
Sorry, and I realise this is off-topic, but your first point is simply not true, and is a really good example of people being given poor statistics by lazy or badly educated journalists, and believing them.
ADSL broadband line sync speed is determined by the protocol (e.g. the various flavours of
ITU G.992, the quality of the line and the distance from exchange, and by proximity to sources of interference along the route. Most people's line speed in the UK is further limited (often quite significantly) by their internal house telephony wiring, and in particular by the ring extension wire (pin 3 from the master socket). Much of the rest of the world never implemented the pin 3 ring extension wire, so don't have that problem. If you fix that (5 minutes on Google plus a 2 minute DIY job,
here's a starter for ten) the average broadband speed across the UK will leap significantly.
The next issue is the degree to which your ISP throttles actual data throughput to manage the traffic on their backhaul network - and that's your second point about Sky, which is true.
The final issue is that there are lots of technical ways of delivering Internet connections (ADSL, DSL, fibre, CATV), all with different performance profiles.
The recent league tables showing the UK in 30th place completely failed to differentiate between any of these. If you compare like with like e.g. compare ADSL vs ADSL, and factor in the proportion of the
area of the country that can get access to broadband (which is a good indicator of proximity to the exchange), and factor in the proportion of people who simply haven't bothered to remove their pin 3, you'd find the UK leaping up the scale significantly.
So please, don't just believe the stats about how bad broadband in the UK is. Fix your house telephone wiring, then focus on the real issue - the backhaul throttling (often called a "fair usage policy"), which is the only thing that your ISP can actually change without significant investment.
/rant.