But that's what's confusing, as these packages now have a minimum guarantee you'd think that would factor in more strongly. But then we knew the OFCOM ruling was kinda flawed to begin with.
The minimum guarantee is something additional BT have added themselves, which goes above and beyond even what OpenReach guarantee ISP's.
It's nothing to do with OFCOM.
Most other ISP's don't have such a minimum guarantee and for good reason.
It's considerably above what GPON can deliver if everyone on the PON took a 1Gb service.
The average is just that, an average. It isn't any kind of minimum guarantee.
It doesn't matter if some customers get less at times as long as the average is maintained.
Like I said, even your choice of NIC could drag that speed down as older Realtek Gigabit NICs would fall well short.
Customers hardware limitations (like poor NIC's) are irrelevant.
The ISP can test directly from the CPE.
They aren't guaranteeing any kind of throughput to devices.
I think Ofcom and ISPs worldwide are doing a great disservice to not have guaranteed and maximum speeds stated, as averages were most necessary due to limitations of DSL sync rates rather than the actual network capacity.
You can't expect high throughput guarantees on a residential service.
Look at the pricing of a 100Mb leased line with 1Gb burst.
It's considerably more than these 1Gb residential packages cost.
Some will always complain asking why the minimum guarantees are so low with the usual "I thought full fibre meant full speed all the time" complaints.
Others will complain that they can't ever reach the headline rate, usually due to wireless or hardware limitations.
The vast majority of the internet can't even fill a 1Gb line.
Even when an ISP has enough bandwidth available on their network there will always be someone there to complain about something.
There's no easy fix for advertising these residential packages that will satisfy everyone.