Residential Broadband Service - CHOICE # 438

Imagine a world without internet access because, for whatever reasons, the broadband service has ceased functioning.

This is, of course, unlikely as there are internet service providers in town eager to cater to your every need for access to the virtual world.

But it does bring home the importance of reliability and quality service. The choice of a residential broadband service provider is not a matter to be taken lightly.

Help is now on hand from the Consumer Council which has just completed an opinion survey on the usage of residential broadband service, with focus on the key areas of speed, technical support, customer service, and the overall satisfaction with their broadband service.

The findings of the survey, based on telephone interviews successfully conducted with 3,026 users between November 2012 and January 2013, are as informative as they are useful to the internet consumers.

Most of the respondents (89.5%) connected using fixed line networks, of which over half (52.6%) use fiber-to-the-home links, compared to only 7.5% of respondents who connected via mobile broadband.

According to the survey, only half (48.8%) of the respondents found the service they were subscribing satisfactory or very satisfactory. An almost equally large proportion (41.8%) of respondents rated the service as ordinary.

However, not an insignificant minority (9%) were dissatisfied with the subscribed service. Reasons for the discontentment were mainly sluggishness in surfing or downloading video clips.

Among the 3,026 respondents, around one third (36.2%) of them had reservations about recommending the service they were using to friends and relatives, which clearly suggests there is much room for improvement in the service of the providers.

Other highlights of the survey showed that while over a third (37.1%) of the respondents replied that they subscribed to a plan that offered a maximum download speed of 100 megabits per second (Mbps), a nearly same proportion of users (37.4%) were unable to provide the information or simply forgot the maximum download speed.

According to the respondents, the peak period in internet usage was from 9pm to midnight, as half (50.1%) of them said this was the timeslot they went online most frequently. Another popular timeslot was from 6pm to 9pm, as indicated by 25.8% of the respondents that they logged in during that period.

Nearly 30% (29.8%) of the respondents said they experienced downtime in the past 3 months at the time of the interview.

As indicated in the feedback of respondents who mostly went online between 21:00 and 23:59, customers' rating on speed appeared to correspond with the capacity of the broadband. The wider the bandwidth of the service plan used, the more positive the users' evaluation.

On customer service, a majority (51.9%) of respondents in the survey who had used the customer hotline (29.2%) found the service useful or very useful, but over one-third (36.2%) found it difficult or very difficult to get through.

While users can check and measure the speed of their broadband connection with the performance test system available on the website of the Office of Communications Authority (OFCA) (http://speedtest.ofca.gov.hk/index.html), they are reminded that the measurement of the speed of service can be affected by a number of external factors like the associated services provided by the internet service provider, the number of applications being used by the users, the configurations of the users' hardware, and the number of users who are sharing the same broadband connection at the same time.

Further, both the configuration of the hardware, and the software installed such as the firewall or anti-virus software, may also have an impact on the speed and performance of the broadband service.