SamKnows has been awarded a contract by Ofcom (the UK communications regulator) for the provision of research and data collection in relation to UK fixed-line broadband speeds delivered by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and is now looking for volunteers to join the project.
It’s been over six months since the Ofcom UK Broadband Speeds 2009 report [...]

Virgin Media announced this morning that it is to start rolling out a 100Mb commercial service before the end of the year. The ISP also claimed that it is extending a small trial of 200Mb connections.
Quoting figures from SamKnows’ Performance Monitoring service which, in partnership with Ofcom, measures access speeds across the country, Virgin claimed [...]

We’re currently deploying a large batch of Performance Monitoring units that will form the basis of our next report. Keen readers of the site will know that a few months back we sought volunteers for the project via a posting in the news here. Well, we took over 1000 registrations in a day, which was [...]

We’ve been rather quiet on the progress of the Performance Monitoring project we’re carrying out, and for that I apologise. The process of deploying nearly 250 units, managing the data collection and fielding queries from users has certainly been an enlightening one!
That said, we’ve now collected all of the data for the first set of [...]

This is just a brief update to say that we’ve sent out the final confirmation email to the first 200 users of the Performance Monitoring Network. We plan to start shipping the units within the next week.
We’ve had such a big response to the project that we could only fulfill a fraction of the requests [...]

I’ve long been frustrated by the confusion surrounding broadband performance, and it seems I’m not alone. Ofcom is currently working with ISPs to formulate a Code of Practice that will provide consumers with more information at the point of sale on their likely broadband speed. But is it really right for us to expect a [...]