UK Users Making Better Connections

Internet customers in the UK have experienced fewer problems trying to connect to their ISP since April, according to Inverse Network Technology.

According to Inverse’s UK BenchMark report, the call failure rate (which measures the percent of time that users are not able to connect to their ISP on the first try) during evening hours was as high as 9.5 percent in March but almost halved to 5.2 percent in June. Inverse also saw an improvement in Web Throughput, which measures how fast the data is flowing to the user. It increased from 3.25 Kbps in March to 3.39 in June.

“The trend for high Call Failure Rate performance during January to March was mainly attributed to large numbers of people trying to connect to the Internet as a result of the explosion of free-subscription ISPs,” said Peter Dove, Inverse’s European managing director. “The general improvement in performance may partially be linked to a slight drop in the number of new customers as the initial gold rush for free Internet access slowed down.”

Individual ISPs that have performed well over the first six months of 1999 include BT Click.com, UUNET, and CompuServe.

“Despite the Call Failure Rate problems in the first quarter, our BenchMark reports have seen the industry average on this metric settle down over the half year, with just over five percent of connect calls failing during the evening hours period in June,” Dove said. “There is still plenty of room for improvement as in June the industry average in the Time to Download a Web page metric reached its highest point this year, at about 24 seconds per page.”

Inverse’s UK BenchMark is an accurate simulation of the typical Internet user’s experience in the UK. Inverse automatically places 60,000 calls to the UK’s 18 most popular ISP each month from standard PCs based in Leeds, London, and Bristol. The calls attempt to be connected to each ISP then, if successful, go on to access and download a series of popular Web sites in the UK, Europe, and the US.