Streamyx

Broadband is a common facility in most modern homes, the rise in speeds over the past few years has seen prices tumble to keep in line with what customers are willing to spend. For the price you paid for a 128kb connection four years ago, you can now expect to receive an average speed of 2MB broadband from some suppliers.

With nearly every household being able to afford some form of Broadband package these days most suppliers are now faced with the battle to gain your loyalty, attractive new customer packages are a plenty on our televisions and in order to make your company appear as the better choice some companies have resorted to boasting and mud-slinging to get you to switch on.

Virgin and BSkyB are two such competitors who are in direct competition for customers, both now offering universal packages comprising of Broadband, Television and Telephones. Both companies have put out slightly misleading advertising campaigns belittling the opponent, who in turn have filed complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA).

BSkyB complained, amongst other competitors as well, that Virgin Media had unfairly compared the speed of their 8MB broadband to Virgin's 2MB deal, Virgin claimed their cabling did not degrade the further you lived from your telephone exchange as they use fibre optics rather than the older telephone lines comprised of copper. Other complaints included the omission of the prefix "up to" when describing broadband speeds.

The "up to" scandal is one that has plagued broadband companies for the past year or two, when they advertise speeds companies are now required to say that advertised speeds are only if you have a very good connection and since a good proportion of customers aren't going to fit in this category then they should be warned that they may not get exactly what they think they're paying for,

The best way to find out if your current broadband is up to scratch is to find out how far away from your local exchange you are, the closer you are the better your broadband will be, if you use an online broadband speed test are another way to determine the actual speed, but don't fret if you are getting below half the advertised speed, this is fairly common and something the government is looking into changing.

Companies like Virgin are changing this by installing fibre optic cabling to increase the strength of the signal over long distances, in countries like Japan they already have this technology and can handle much faster speeds that make our "high speed" broadband seem pedestrian in comparison.

If you are looking for cheap broadband whether you have an existing provider or not then you can compare broadband deals online. Also if you are thinking about changing your supplier then check your connection using one of the various broadband speed test websites to see whether you are getting your money's worth.