It looks like the broadband customers in UK are caught between the ISPs who are run by business motives and the high-bandwidth services which are reluctant to contribute to the internet costs. Most ISPs advertise higher speeds but they rarely deliver those speeds, especially during peak hours (between 4pm to 1am). Customers, on the other hand, subscribe to high speed broadband packages paying hefty fee and found it disappointing to see their speeds are throttled during these hours. It is needless to say that most customers are attracted by high-bandwidth programmes like P2P, online gaming and video on demand services etc. However, when they find that their speeds are managed or their usage is underestimated by the ISPs, they often need to upgrade their packages or choose tailored packages which shatter the concept of net neutrality. This problem is raised by an e-petition lead by Lee Sexton. The e-petition is under-signed by many users (anyone can sign till 31st May, 2008) and will be addressed to the government.

The petition attributes the degradation of service to ISPs who oversubscribe on their networks and do all kinds of traffic shaping to avoid congestion on the lines. Finally, it is end users who suffer from poor service and slower connections. Thus, the key issue raised by the petition is throttling of speed and the attitude of ISPs over the usage of customers who like to access the wide range of web sites available today.

“With todays broadband services, eg Games on Demand (up to 4gb per download), movies on demand (up to 2gb in size) and music on demand (anything up to 300mb per album) ISP's have severely underestimated customers usage and rely on this underestimate to continue to oversubscribe their networks and keep the status quo. The problem now being is that the status quo is no longer maintained as we are now being throttled on speeds and blocking ports to restrict the speed we signed up for.”

More details on e-petition.