Broadband Britain

In all good newsagents from 1st March

I rarely use this blog as a place to show off my work at PC Advisor - if you want to read what I write in my day job, it's all there at pcadvisor.co.uk - but the broadband survey I produce each year is a different matter. 


It's a large-scale project based around an indepth questionnaire asking readers about their internet service provider and how well they are performing. We've just completed our seventh such survey. The report can be read here: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/features/broadband/3338346/pc-advisor-home-broadband-survey-2012/. 

It gives readers the chance to sound off about problems they've encountered, to log the connection speed they can achieve and to talk about what they most value in an ISP. With around 6000 entries each year, we are able to build up a detailed picture of UK household web use and to give readers an idea of whether a particular broadband provider will suit their needs.

It's not a perfect means of establishing which ISPs are good and which are under-performing - the survey is open for several months, so reliability and achievable access speeds will change over that time. Even so, customer service feedback, promises delivered on or not, and actual customers stating whether or not they would recommend -or intend to stick with - their ISP helps others decide which to use themselves.

We've come to depend on the web  - it's one of the biggest aspects of our leisure hours as well as information, yet vast inequalities of access remain. It would be great if price and customer service rather than actual connectivity were the big issues, but we're not there yet.