Anyone who has read my previous posts here may have gleaned that I have a certain disdain for big companies over-hyping their own products. Having seen so many instances of BT coming so close to telling outright lies as makes no difference, I was understandably sceptical when I heard BT claims that their 21st Century Network (21CN) would give users broadband ADSL speeds of “up to 24MB/s.”
Sure enough, what do you know, it turns out I was rightly sceptical. Buried in a statement from BT’s CTO announcing that BT would not implement traffic shaping, was an admission that you would need to be practically in the exchange to achieve that kind of speed and a prediction that real speeds would be somewhere in the region of 8-12MB/s. So basically we’ll get roughly the speeds that BT (and other ISPs) have been telling us we can get for a year or more now ? Wow. That’s right up there with
From just £9.99 a month
£9.99 a month for first 6 months, £17.99 a month for the next 12
Don’t you just love marketers?
Well while Orange was enjoying some “down time” I contacted them to ask WHY?
During my long conversation with 2nd level support I was told that my expected speed when I they migrate to 21CN is only 3Mb. Which is only 512Kbps faster that my current connection (when its working that is) WHY BOTHER for such a small benefit.