Broadband Speeds

I’m not a fan of all the recent bleating about broadband speeds and how we’re apparently being “conned” by our ISP’s. The wording is already clear… you get “up to” 8 Mbps. You can’t then complain that you only get 2 or 3.

However, testing your actual connection speed is something else entirely. How do you know what speed you are actually running at? Using 7 different online speed testers I’ve just received an upload speed of anything between 537 and 960 Kbps and a download speed between 2498 and 3494 Kbps. That’s a rather big difference and the kind of thing that will cause more people to write to Watchdog, Ofcom, and whoever else.

Is there a definitive way of working it out?

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2 responses

Mike Fisher

19th January 2009

In my rural area and on BT;they quote up to 8 MPS.
The best download speed in the morning is around 170 KPS.
In the evening this can drop to the 20 KPS but is generally below 50 KPS.

This is 3 miles from the centre of Droitwich,Worcs and the BT Exchange

David

19th January 2009

Are you saying therefore that BT are wrong to quote “up to 8 MPS”? I would have thought that being in a rural location and 3 miles from your exchange, that kind of speed wouldn’t be unexpected.

Do the online checkers (where you put in your phone number/postcode) give you any better idea of speed? For example, what does O2 estimate?

And, of course, and the ISPs can’t be held to account for this, a lot of the speed is down to the quality of the wiring and connectivity from the BT plate in your home. Have you tried an iPlate?

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