BROADBAND OPERATORS will have to significantly alter their promotional material from the beginning of next month to more accurately reflect the actual download speeds available to subscribers, The Irish Times has learned.
At present, many broadband providers use their advertising to stress the maximum connection speed available through their service and only include the phrase "up to" in a font which, critics say, is all too easy to miss.
The new code will take effect on April 7th, after which operators advertising maximum speeds will also have to tell potential customers the average broadband speed attained by their service during "the busiest hour" of the week, averaged over the previous quarter.
The move will have a significant impact on the mobile broadband providers. Vodafone, 02 and 3 all claim to offer ínternet connection speeds of "up to" 3.4Mb per second (Mbps). At this speed, users could download an album from iTunes in less than 10 minutes. However, speeds never come close to this magic number and sometimes struggle to reach a third of it.
While it is impossible to say what the advertised speeds will fall to once the new code comes into force, industry sources estimate during the busiest hour of the busiest day of the week it will be closer to 800 kilobytes per second - less than one-quarter that currently advertised.
The assistant chief executive of the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland, Orla Twomey, said it had received "quite a number of complaints in relation to broadband speed".
