UK broadband users can now finally find out how much bandwidth really is made available by their providers, claiming “up-to” speeds in the dizzy heights, but as Ofcom’s long awaited search unveils, leaves speeds much within the grounded realms of disappointment. The data, compiled with the help of SamKnows, shows a vast lack in delivering the connection speeds promised and indeed paid for, with thousands of customers receiving as little as half of the levels advertised. Not all results have been released in Ofcom’s recent press release (multiple download rates for example), but alone the table below shows pretty precisely how much customers could consider themselves ripped off by some, if not most providers.

One clear signal is that Virgin Media is well ahead of its competition, boasting its success in performance thanks to luxurious fibre optic connectivity. Other providers will no doubt be red in the face at a rather embarassing average of 6.5Mbps for a paid service of “up to 20/24Mbps”. The graph shows that Virgin Media’s single thread results average 15.2 to 16.5Mbps over 24 hours compared to 6.5 to 8.4Mbps for TalkTalk (up to 24Mbps) ,7.0 to 8.4Mbps for Sky (up to 20Mbps) and BT scraping the bottom of the barrel with 6.1 to 7.6Mbps. Good news for Virgin’s fibre optic technology, bad news for everyone else not even managing to deliver half of the speed on copper lines already at the point of breaking their capacity.

Ofcom obviously is driven to urge providers to put their (if not the customer’s!) money where their mouth is and deliver speeds advertised, or at least vaguely near them. Ofcom has also put together a new voluntary code of conduct for the industry, allowing consumers to cancel their broadband service penalty-free within the first three months should connection speed be significantly below promised levels.

Similar to Sony in the dawning of the flatscreen TV, although BT plans to spend £2.5bn installing fibre-based broadband in two-thirds of the country by 2015, one can’t help wondering if this is too little too late, with Virgin on a steady course to fulfill promises made in June to offer bandwidth speed of up to 100Mbps by the end of the year. More information regarding Ofcom findings can be found on Ofcom’s website