Ever wonder why sometimes the video you’re watching over the internet stutters? Or why it takes an age for a web page to load? It doesn’t matter how flashy your computer is, or how many times you turn it off and on again. The real problem is with the quality of your broadband connection.

To watch high-quality TV over the internet, or download songs in seconds, you will probably need broadband speeds of about 8 megabits per second (Mbs). Some suppliers say they can achieve this and much more, providing anything up to 20Mbs. In reality, there is a massive difference between the actual and advertised speed, as shown by today's Ofcom report.

Much depends on where you live. The farther your home is from a telephone exchange, the slower the speed. So a 8Mbs connection can be as slow as 512 kilobits per second if you are five miles from an exchange. Another thing that will cause the speed to dip is if too many people in the same house try to connect to the internet at once.

This is why most homes in London will have no problem playing a video using the BBC iPlayer service, which requires about 1Mbs, but many people in rural areas will not be able to use it to catch up with their favourite programmes.

It also means that those living out in the sticks are likely to be paying the same, or even more, than city-dwellers for their broadband connection, but getting a much worse speed for their money.

Increasing speeds drastically would need massive investment in upgrading the broadband network from old copper wires to super-fast fibreoptic lines. A recent report said that, to achieve that across the country, it would cost £29 billion.

Some experts suggest that the future is with “mobile broadband”. This is where, instead of connecting to the internet through the home telephone line, people connect using a “dongle” that plugs straight into your laptop or PC.

But that has it own problems. Technically, mobile broadband should work anywhere there is a mobile phone signal. But anywhere there is a weak connection, or where the phone masts have not been upgraded to the new 3G standard, will find drastically reduced broadband speeds. Once again, big cities are well connected. Rural areas face more frustration.

In any case, mobile broadband is generally far slower than the connection piped straight to your home. For example, companies such as Vodafone and 3 advertise that customers can reach of speeds of up to 7.2Mbs. But that top pace is rare - if not impossible.

Realising this, both companies advise customers that they are likelier to receive much slower speeds than the maximum. For the most part, the best you can hope for with mobile broadband is speeds around 1-5 Mbs.

With broadband, at least, you rarely get what you pay for