Interesting results from ThinkBroadband’s latest comparison between the main internet providers. Unsurprisingly for some, BE and O2 come out on top of everything including speed, which might seem odd considering the most they can offer is 24 Mb/s but Virgin offer 50 Mb/s products. Virgin has even started talking about launching 400 Mb/s services in the near future – so what gives?
Well for those of you who watched one of the many sporting events over BBC’s Iplayer you will have realised that the reduction in cost of broadband over the last few years has reduced capacity levels within core networks. This means that when the need for bandwidth is there, the capacity isn’t and everyone suffers from packet loss, high response rates and low throughput. While Virgin may have its own network it obviously hasn’t made the necessary investment into it, unlike the Telefonica O2 group. BE doesn’t support a legacy BT network, which O2 does offer, which probably explains the difference in performance. Key point is the wholesale platform offered to ISPs must be good if the consumer businesses can achieve so much with it.
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