Should our ISP's be regulated?

And the articles in the UK press about how wonderful French broadband is..

I am with BT and get really annoyed at their adverts about super fast broadband - get mine right first .

Me too, Barrow. Not fast enough for telephone or television. The Guardian takes 10 minutes to download to the ipad. I pay 27 euros a month to the service provider and it goes slow in rain and fog....

Living in the countryside I don't get anything like the speed advertised, yet I pay the same as someone living in town who gets very high speed. I think the charge should be based on the actual speed received rather than a one size fits all payment

Spare a thought for those of us with 512k, no competition and no immediate chance of anything better. A complaint brings a shrug and a "mais vous etes en campagne".....

BT are working quite hard in my area to get us to change to their superfast broadband - and I think Virgin has bucked up as a result. So maybe competition could be the regulator for us customers?

I guess the time will come, and not far off, that high speed internet access will become a service like your TV signal, that can be accessed anywhere. BT are already trying to make internet available to all their customers from thousands of hot spots across the country. If other companies did the same, country wide internet would be near complete. I'm sure that commerce will demand high speed fibre optic internet across the country very soon, or we will fall behind other leading business nations. Japan are launching 1Gbps internet later this year, that is 50 times faster than anything available in the UK.

Don't have any problems at all, so happy.

People come home, fire up the PC or the laptop - and you have contention for the servers and the transport medium (copper wire or optical fibre) -- naturally things slow down for everybody - everything is in a queue.

Oh, I've already said something to that affect, haven't I.

Sorry.

Yes. Drives me mad in the evenings Septuagent. Was trying to watch something on i-player the other evening and it kept having to stop and 'catch up with itself'.

I suspect that the slowness of the internet at certain times of the day has got more to do with the users and their usage of it, than with evil ISPs sitting in underground bunkers fiddling with connections.

Internet busyness varies as the day progresses, as one continent wakes up, and others go to bed. What is needed is more capacity, which requires more investment.

My internet often goes really slow later in the evenings. I didn't realise this might be because the provider might be doing it deliberately to save them money!

I think you are right. They should be moderated. Internet use is becoming a utility. They should be made to be fair with us.

I just think they get away with too much at the moment - they can do as they please. Not that I wouldn't like to do the same, but I'm not providing a service that we increasingly rely upon.

For example, I gather that some personal alarm systems use the internet to communicate with their central control.

I'd normally be the last to suggest any more Government control, but I think there is a case for it here.

Interesting question!

Perhaps they should be, but how and to what extent?