About fibre optics,

We live in a small village with very slow speeds, we have a small village school, with a fibre optic cable running 12 feet from my house, this could provide the highest speeds possible for the whole village, what a waste.

Rob, Notts,

I have read the reports of "slow" speeds with envy. The best speed I have ever received is 0.4mbps. It seems that BT just don't care about customers who live in rural areas but as we are generally deprived of facilities, that most take for granted, a decent service is really vital, especially when many small businesses depend on a decent connection.

Rod Boyce, Lyme Regis, U.K.

When you're plodding along the M1 on your way to work at 5mph in a car that is capable of "up to" 200mph, are you going to complain that the car was sold to you in a misleading way or that the road is congested? Unfortunately, broadband operators sell you access to the road and lease you the car, metaphorically speaking, but market it as if you're driving alone on the autobahn. We have to push broadband operators to make the roads wider, not the cars faster and stop whining about "misleading advertising". Vote with your feet - if you don't like one operator, switch to another. You might be surprised that if you REALLY want 20Mbps broadband you're going to have to fork out significantly more than you currently are.

broadbandcritic, London, UK

I got 1.4 MB from Pipex Homecall when BT were only offering 512 mbps. This was fine until last September, when it had dropped to 1.3 MB. I was told by Pipex that BT had promised up to 1.9 MB on the line when the essential maintenance was finished at the Egham Exchange. After a few days, and £8 of phone calls, it seems BT had switched off the Pipex gear at the Egham Exchange. When the connection was
re-established I had 1.2 MB. I tried to get BT to test the line but the automated thing just says I am not a BT customer so contact my provider. Pipex Homecall haven't done anything about it as far as I know.
I heard of schemes to run BB cable through sewers, but we have a local sewerage plant not connected to mains drainage. We are too far from the town to even have cable TV. I wish Sky could do BB by satellite. The rural customers could have a decent service then. BT should be made to upgrade all rural cables to fibre optics before town customers get upgraded....
and pigs might fly

Beryl, Windsor, England

I am in China (!) I pay for 1mbps. I get 1mbps. When I lived in Taiwan, I paid for 2mbps and I got 2mbps. When I went home for Christmas I was gobsmacked at how much my parents were paying for very very slow "broadband". As far as I am aware the Sale of Goods Act 1979 as amended in er um about 1985 applies to the provision of services. There is also the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 (?) to think about when it comes to the term "up to". At some point this must surely come into play when "eleventy billion bps" is really 600k bps and the contract says "oh but we don't really guarantee anything".

I never thought I'd say this, but is it time to renationalise BT and go back to the Post Office Telecommunications as part of the GPO? [And give us back the Royal Mail as part thereof.] Funny that state-owned China Telecom is showing up the UK telcos in terms of residential broadband. Who benefited from privatising BT anyway? Didn't the taxpayer pay for the internet backbone in the first place?

Warren Hamilton, Shanghai,

Dont feel bad - its exactly the same here and we pay more. In a semi-rural are you will also have one provider if you are lucky.

Bill Atkins, Rehoboth Beach, USA

What people fail to realize is, is that content they download can only travel as fast as the source of the content can send it at.
IE, if you have 20MB broadband, and download a file no quicker then 9MB, then it's more then likely the that the servers your downloading from are eith busy, restricted on what bandwidth they supply, or distributing Bandwidth equally between users (AKA) "Network Shaping".
If you download 3-4 files at once, then yes, you should get a combined "UPTO 20MB" Download Speed.
That "UPTO" is the magic word, You could download 1 File at 1900kb/s and then would take another 20 files to get you near 2000kb/s, just the fact that the more files you download simultaneously, the more likely you'll acheive download speeds advertised by ISP's.

Gav, Birmingham, Birmingham

Maybe they shoudl rate the charge compared to the online test for your postcode maximum speed depending on the individuals distance from the local exchange.
Decreasing the cost depending on this rather then selling an up to XMB slogan would seem a fair price adjustment to the customers level of service.

Lawrence mcintosh, Liverpool, Knowlsey, England

Same old story, rip off Britain. And who cares, nobody !
What's the Sale of Goods Act for, or aren't they selling goods ! Retailers get done for selling in pounds instead of kilo's, or selling beer short of a pint, but if the providers sell us short, hey man ! We need profits !

Phil de Buquet, Newport, England