Swedish providers agree to market real-world mobile broadband speeds

Mobile broadband headline speeds: just one of the things which can cause disappointment and frustration for mobile broadband users. The practice of promoting 'headline' or maximum theoretical speeds when selling mobile broadband just about scrapes in on the right side of false advertising, but is considered by many to be unfair and misleading.

The common use of the phrase 'up to' in conjunction with a decent looking Mb speed is technically accurate, but while the network may be theoretically capable of that speed, most users will never experience anything close.

Now in Sweden, a country which somewhat makes the running in terms of mobile broadband, operators have agreed to take a more honest approach. Sweden’s four main mobile network operators TeliaSonera, Tele2, Telenor and 3 have agreed on guidelines for advertising download speeds of their mobile broadband services, which allow customers to see the practical maximum speed - i.e the real-world speed - of the network, rather than the theoretical maximum.

The new guidelines, which are to be adopted no later than 1 September this year, agree set speeds for each technology and implementation - so for example what we see marketed as 3.6Mb gives an agreed real-world speed of 3Mbps, where we see 7.2Mb the agreed real-world speed is 6Mb, and the next leap, 14.4Mb will really only offer 10Mb.

It's a great leap forward for honest, realistic marketing of mobile broadband, which focusses on managing expectations rather than trying to attract custom with unrealistic headline speeds; and we hope the UK industry follows suit.