A news article for PC Plus magazine that reflects on Conservative leader David Cameron’s criticism of the communications regulator Ofcom. Here’s an excerpt:
[David] Cameron could be aiming his reformist quango-gun in the wrong direction. Ofcom is primarily funded by payments from broadcasting licensees and communications providers. Government grants are only provided for specific projects. The regulator even pumped £223 million back into the Treasury last year.
And when it comes to looking after the interests of the taxpayer, Ofcom don’t appear to have been putting a foot wrong. It has long sought to curb exorbitant mobile roaming charges, while its commitment to Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) has improved competition in the UK broadband market.
Further help in that area has come from Ofcom’s newest investigation into real-world broadband speeds, which damned many broadband providers for failing to deliver the speeds they advertise.
Over 60 million separate service performance tests were carried out in over 1,600 homes between November 2008 and April 2009. The results showed that the average broadband speed in the UK was a sluggish 4.1Mbps and that only nine per cent of sampled customers with 8Mbps packages actually received speeds of over 6Mbps.
The full article appears in issue 286 of PC Plus magazine.
