Sure holds key to price and speed
Friday 19th February 2010, 2:29PM GMT.
Gamer Mike Simon finds it frustrating to be left behind on Xbox 360 game Halo due to the island’s slow broadband speed. (Picture by Steve Sarre, 0917560)
In the UK, homes can get speeds of up to 20Mb for as little as £15.
But despite a promise to lower its prices last year, Sure is still charging higher prices for much slower speeds.
It offers up to 8Mb for businesses, but that costs £79.99 a month.
Its 2Mb home service costs £24.99, although Newtel, which was bought by Wave Telecom last year, offers the same for £21.99.
Sure said it planned to review its prices, but had no further comment to make.
Wave deputy managing director Guy Pipon said Sure controlled the broadband speeds on offer and his company was unable to offer a cheaper service.
Mike Simon, 59, is one internet user who is not happy with the service he gets. He said internet in Guernsey is not fast enough and something needs to be done.
- Read the full story in the Guernsey Press. See below for subscription details.
- To read Guernsey Press stories in full click here for subscription details. Individual editions are now available online.
Island Life
All about Guernsey
Ambassador of the Year 2011
History & Heritage
Visitor Information
Guernsey's government
Campaigns
Voice For Victims
Voice for Victims is a campaign aimed at promoting the rights of those affected by child sexual abuse.
This is Guernsey
Guernsey Press
Useful Links
I honestly do not know how Sure can charge 24.99 for 2Mb, when Jersey can get 8Mb for 18.99.
Where’s the justice!?
Report abuse
The price is high cos of the cartel locally. It would be nice for the OUR to open up more competition with ISPs.
The service is not that great either. I experience numerous breaks in connection which can be frustrating at times.
Report abuse
For online gaming a quick ping is more important, even so Sure rip us off.
Report abuse
Sure broadband is a total rip off and RUBBISH service. Slow, doesn’t often run at 2Mb either. I speed test regularly and it’s often less than 1Mb. I have a business service until October last year but I just couldn’t justify the 79.99 monthly charge, especially as it was barely any faster – I was lucky if the speed ever went over 3Mb and 1.5 to 2 was more the usually speed for nearly 80 quid!!!!! That would be less than a tenner on the mainland! Truly shocking abuse of a monopoly. Time it changed. Isn’t it time the OUR took a serious look at this?
Report abuse
Sam – some countries don’t have broadband Internet access at all….where’s the justice?
Report abuse
We have been entirely ripped off by Sure’s dominance over internet provision for a very long time, as we are with land lines.
Anyone noticed how there’s lots of special offers on mobiles (where there’s competition) whilst where there’s no competition, ie. landlines and internet provision, prices either continually rise or remain high for no apparent reason?
Interesting, n’est pas…?
One could be forgiven for thinking that Sure are subsidising their mobile offers at landline users expense, and for wondering why the OUR aren’t vigorously investigating these somewhat obvious tactics (as they stated they would many years ago), as well as challenging the aforementioned telecom provider which is obviously ripping us ALL off for internet provision…
strangely, they don’t appear willing to do anything about either situation, both of which have been going on for a very long time…
which leads me to a second thought one could be forgiven for, that the OUR aren’t there to protect our ‘consumer rights’ by ensuring ‘fair competition’, but are actually just a bunch of imported, over paid, over bearing ‘experts’ who are there to spout useless, self important cr*p, whilst the rest of us muppets foot the bill.
Report abuse
Isn’t it time the OUR deal with areas like broadband where we are getting a very poor deal compared to the UK rather than mess about with Guernsey Post, which by comparison provides a pretty efficient and cost effective service. Time to prioritise I think…
Report abuse
Broadband prices in Guernsey have been too high for too long. I wrote to OUR 3 years ago giving examples of speed and cost but it must have just fallen on deaf ears as three years later the price is unchanged. When the 2Mb speed was introduced I had it a few months early on test and for 10 minutes I had speeds of at least 8Mb, so even then they were restricting access speeds. The price of broadband in the UK and Jersey has fallen so why hasn’t it here and remember the UK price includes VAT, which if you add to the Sure price gives a comparison of £29.37.
Report abuse
mhh – you don’t get 2Mb because there is a contention ratio which means that you share the bandwidth with other users, meaning that you’ll never get full speed as long as other people are online. This is normal for broadband services worldwide.
In Guernsey our contention ration is 40:1 which means that you are sharing your bandwidth with 40 other broadband users. If you’re a business user, I believe this drops to 20:1 but don’t quote me on that.
Of course I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be able to get faster speeds, but even then you still wouldn’t get the advertised speed.
Report abuse
The Guernsey telecoms user does certainly get poor value for money compared with UK and Jersey – especially in regard to internet services. When the old States owned company was sold off for a pittance, the service was among the cheapest and most advanced in the world and yet required no subsidy. What went wrong?
Report abuse
Its down to the regulator to allow this. Broadband by design is a difficult, high speeds down old copper wires where attenuation increases as distance does. To get a good stable broadband connection you need to be at the most 3.5k cable length from the multiplexer providing your internal residential wiring is up to the job, that is the same everywhere, these issues can be overcome by putting multiplexers closer to residential area’s to decrease line distance and improve stability and speed which I think they are doing. I used to live in England until recently and my broadband service was not great even though my connection speed was very good and I had pretty good line statistics, it was throttled by my provider. Its a contended asymmetrical service and I imagine heavily regulated as far as Sure are concerned, it can take time to improve as I guess the revenue generated from it would not make it feasible to put fibre into everyones living room straight away.
Report abuse
Paul Le Page – We’re supposedly a wealthy island. We have tarmac on our roads, cars which run on petrol and nice glass office buildings, yet our Internet speeds don’t reflect this.
If Jersey, which is 27 miles away, has Internet which is 4 times as fast for £7 less, should not have something similar?
We have the capability for superfast speeds because we have a massive online gambling server over here which services the rest of the world, but due to some line issues in Torteval, we can’t.
Also, we’re not responsible for the rest of the world’s Internet connection, so please don’t start with the moral highground act.
Report abuse
Sam – my post was a tongue in cheek response to your comment “where’s the justice.”
If you seriously consider slower browsing speeds than Jersey an injustice then you have lived a very sheltered life my friend. Examples of injustice are when an innocent person gets convicted of a crime or loses their job because someone has lied to their boss or gets raped and the rapist gets away with it.
Irritation – yes; inconvenience – yes; injustice – no
Report abuse
How often over here do you hear of someone getting raped and then the rapist getting away with it.
How often over here do you hear of someone losing their job because someone has lied to their boss.
Guernsey is a sheltered place, no wonder I’ve lived a sheltered life. In my life, the internet speeds are fairly important, I do a lot of stuff on the internet, streaming video, playing games and such.
Report abuse
Sam – I’m beginning to understand why you used that phraseology as your last post shows a staggering naivete. You really must have lived a sheltered life, even by Guernsey standards! I suggest some time away from your computer and get out a bit more. Just because you haven’t heard of it inbetween playing World of Warcraft doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen – often it isn’t reported because people are too afraid to speak out. Speak to some social workers or the people at the women’s refuge – they’ll have a story or two for you for starters….
Report abuse
The local ISPs have to rely on Sure/CW’s monopoly on the physical lines. All they can do is provide IP services over the top of the Sure/CW wholesale service. Sure/CW pick the available speeds and set the wholesale prices (which AFAIK makes up the majority of the price the consumer pays).
Thus no matter what provider you sign up to we still have an ADSL monopoly over here because every single ADSL line is a Sure/CW ADSL line. The other ISPs just get a few quid per month over the wholesale price to provide the bandwidth off the island and email etc (or not in the case of Wave).
Jersey have faster speeds because Jersey Telecom have rolled out a next gen network (at vast expense). Sure/CW haven’t bothered updating the systems over here, other than adding a few roadside repeater boxes in the upper parishes.
OUR need to kick Sure/CW into touch and get them to reduce the wholesale prices and/or to invest more into the core network. A suspicious person might suggest that CW have no interest in pumping money into Sure…
Report abuse
PLP- I don’t actually play World of Warcraft, that’s for nerds! But I do feel that if we’re having to pay £25 a month, we should at least get a decent service.
This isn’t about the Women’s Refuge or social workers. It’s about getting a value for money service, which at the moment we don’t seem to get.
Report abuse
Agree with everyone here, the service is terrible. We recently moved home, It took 4 weeks to change over our 8mb line. Sure wanted us to carry on paying for a service we didn’t have, then the change over charge on top. Then when its finally connected we get no more than 4mb at best, download speeds as low as 27k/sec and the connection drops all the time. turns out we are on the town exchange when admiral park is less than 200 meters away.
I find it hard to belive their contention ratios are anywhere near what they claim.
So £80 a month for a rubbish service and as usual it’s fine for a company to have a monopoly and charge whatever they like. Thats the Guernsey way though right?
Report abuse
Sam, don’t alienate WoW players by calling them nerds. We all know what you want your speeds for.
Report abuse
As a regular BBC iPlayer user, last year I used to download most programmes I watched because the streaming service would often pause just always at a really good part in the programme. This would usually happen in the evenings when the speed often fell below 1meg.
I’ve been getting 1.9meg recently and the streaming has been excellent.
Fairly recently, there have been increasingly more and more programmes in HD which required 4meg speed. I would really like to watch HD in streaming because they take so long to download.
Please Cable and Wireless, could you give us just a little bit more so we can watch our HD telly? Thank you very much.
Report abuse
Every day I have to have to unplug and plug my Linksys wireless modem/router from the phone socket because the internet connection has been lost.
Not the end of the world but does anybody else have this problem and is there a fix? Not sure if this is to do with C&W or my modem settings. Thanks.
Report abuse
Don’t get me wrong, Sam – I totally agree that we don’t get value for money from our broadband service. My issue was with the term ‘injustice’ that was clearly out of place in this context. Still, it’s not that big a deal, so no need to labour the point! :-)
Oh, and you’re quite right Dean, Sam wants the fast speed to have an online debate with me, far more interested than WoW! :-)
Report abuse