Bath-based digital supply chain management firm Actual Experience has helped telecoms industry regulator Ofcom compile a major report which debunks the view that slow broadband speeds are holding back the economy.
Instead, the quality of the broadband is far more important for the majority of users, Ofcom concludes. As a result it has called on the Government to invest scarce resources in tackling this rather than seek to drive up speeds. 
Ofcom’s used Actual Experience’s powerful BbFix project, which analyses broadband quality for consumers, to reach its conclusion. The project’s data analytics software identifies which factors are detracting from a good online experience.
Its report says: “Line speeds provide only a partial picture of broadband quality of experience. [Other factors] in the wider parts of the end-to-end broadband chain are becoming more significant.”
These are varied and largely outside the control of any single service provider.
Actual Experience CEO Dave Page told the CommsBusiness website: “Ofcom’s findings are highly welcome. A big myth has been debunked.
“For too long, speed has been used as a proxy for broadband quality. We’re told that if you have 40Mbps you will have a great connection and at 2Mbps you will have a dismal connection. Well, I think it is becoming more and more obvious this simply is not the case.
“As stated in Ofcom’s report, for all of those on 10Mbps and above, there are a plethora of other factors affecting broadband quality, which are not been treated and remain unresolved. From problems in the home set-up to complications in the data centres of the content providers, the space for things to go wrong is extensive.
“It is amazing to me that nothing is being done to monitor the full chain between users at one end and the content providers at the other to see where problems are occurring. I am delighted that Ofcom has announced it will work with us to start making a real measure of broadband quality.”
Actual Experience, which spun out of London’s Queen Mary University but is now based in The Tramshed off Walcot Street, crowd-sourced data from more than 1,000 users through Bbfix to help Ofcom.
The firm was co-founded by Queen Mary academic Jonathan Pitts and businessman Dave Page in 2009 and floated on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market earlier this year.
Mr Page added: “Poor digital quality affects everyone, from the individual to global enterprises and can have a huge impact on productivity and perception of digital brand. The Government is currently focussed on improving poor quality broadband and has previously attributed the majority of the problem to speed.
“The Ofcom data highlights that it is not just speed that is causing poor connectivity, and that financial resources could be more appropriately targeted at improving quality. By avoiding a high speed rollout on the 70% of homes where it will make little or no difference, we could divert resources to the 5% of homes without any broadband and work on fixes to quality for everyone's benefit.”
The report can be found on Ofcom’s website here:
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/infrastructure/2014/infrastructure-14.pdf
