ISPs (again)

Last night, on BBC, the consumer show "Watchdog" revealed the results to it's survey into the best and worst service providers. Apparently 50,000 people contributed, and the BBC, being the BBC, pissed them up the wall and somehow came up with some convoluted system based upon the number of bad ratings compared to good ratings for each ISP. The conclusions were as follows...

The top 5.

BT, AOL, Tiscali, Virgin and Talk Talk.

The bottom 5.

Orange, Talk Talk, BT, Tiscali and AOL.

You'd think this meant they'd only test 5 or 6 ISPs, but they are actually looking at 29. The fact of the matter is, most watchdog viewers wouldn't know a bad ISP unless it came up to them and shat on their telephone. They surf the internet for an hour after tea, maybe they email family in Australia, but when did they last call to find out their FTP server's port ID, or why they are only getting 5kb/s on bit torrent.

The only real independent reliable reports are available from here, and the fact is it's a darn sight more revealing then watchdog ever would be.