This story is of great interest to me on several levels. Firstly because it involves one of my great interests, the Internet. And the other is that I work for one of the companies - BT. I wasn't actaully aware that there was an expected data limited, but according to the story it is only a recommeneded lower limit of 2.4KB - but my mobile GSM is quickier than that.
Even so - 28KB, when most people are now using 56KB modems, is still a very low level, but I suspect I know one of the reasons, but that is a technical matter within at least BT.
Mind you , for a long time, it was practise and policy that the ordinary telephone line was designed to be used as a voice service only, and the fact that you could use a dial up modem on that service, was just your "good luck". BT would only then guarantee data rates on services that were "designed" to carry them (ISDN/Highway and DSL Broadband), mind you I haven't got a clue what policy Kingston Comms carry for these situations.
I love this part of the statement though:
"Users who are not able to access the net via a dial-up account at this speed will be able to demand that their telephone provider do something about it. "
This has been the scene of some loud and vocal arguements - how does the customer prove that they airn't getting this minimum speed, and how does the average engineer prove that they are. I for one, and I know that this doesn't apply to everyone, have various bits of test equipment for testing data rates on DSL and ISDN lines, but nothing specifically for dial-up lines. The normal report in the these circumstances is along the lines "the phone sounds OK when you use it, but the computer connection to the internet was slow last night", an observational fault, but not very scientific. And as you can probibly guess, unless our people can pick up a detectable fault, this sort of thing is very complicated to sort out - "how do you chase a fault you cannot detect?"
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