Devil is in the contract detail for ISP services

Some customers are not receiving the speeds or support they expected

Businesses should pay more attention to the small print in contracts when choosing their internet service provider (ISP) as many ISPs are misleading their customers about broadband speeds, contention ratios and support details, according to Tim Davies, co-founder of specialist ISP IDNet.

Davies told IT Week that despite the claims of many service providers, factors like distance from the exchange and the quality of cabling and routers can all affect download and upload speeds.

There is a lot of misinformation about contention [speeds on shared lines]," said Davies. "It happens not only at the exchange but on networks too [and some ISPs] don't tell firms they could be sharing with hundreds of other users so that 24Mbit/s ADSL half a mile from the exchange [could still] leave you crawling down to dial-up speeds."

Davies added that firms often have to "dive down into the terms and conditions" of the contract to get this type of information from their providers.

"No ISP would voluntarily tone down their message unless everyone else does, but customers generally appreciate our honesty when we tell them all the caveats," he said.

The claim of 24/7 customer support is another area where IT departments have to be careful to read the small print, added Davies. Some ISPs merely mean they will log the query and deal with it within 24 hours - an unacceptable length of time for business-critical applications such as email, he added.

Davies' brother Simon, with whom he founded IDNet, also warned that call centre support provided by large ISPs is sometimes poor. "A large proportion of our [business] customers have had bad experiences with ISP call centres," he said. "The majority have been outsourced abroad where the customer can't understand the operator or the [operator] is just reading through a script – the opportunity to go to that next level of support is not there."

Gary Stocker of manufacturing firm Technoturn, which is an IDNet customer, echoed these comments, pointing to frequent downtime and "diabolical" customer service from the company's previous ISP. "The [support staff] were useless, it was like they were reading off a script," he said. "Often I couldn't understand them either, their accents were so broad – don't go on the salesman's pitch [when looking for a new ISP] because it's often not backed up by quality of service."

Stocker added that his previous service's stated contention ratio of 20:1 was also questionable. "I tested it and it [proved to] be extremely slow, but it's difficult to prove that [to the ISP]. Our business could have stumbled because of problems like these."