Broadband Speed Checker

[Celery Peach]

  Okay so I should of tested this ages ago...but if it aint broke you dont fix it, right ?

So I have noticed my BT broadband connection at work has been getting dramatically worse over the last 10 days, cant say it has ever been good mind.

I did that thing, rung them up, listened to Mozart for 20 minutes....then 'have you got it switched on ? Everything plugged in ? Is your PC on ?' yeah yeah yeah. Could I try another ADSL filter...done that, no joy. That was yesterday and they rang back today to ask if I had and to tell me they would ring again tomorrow Some nonsense about sending a technician.

So I thought, I wonder how fast I am actually getting since I am paying for 'up to' 8MBs - which I think is pretty standard these days isnt it ? I used an online tool to check.

What an amazing insight ! Not only did it tell me I was only getting less than half a Mbps    but on entering my postcode and provider told me exactly where the exchange was and the fact that due to it being so far away, the most they could ever likely give me was 1Mbps. The gits.

Sooo ! I rang the customer care and relayed these facts. To be then told 'well it does say up to 8'    I said well yes, but surely that is not fair representation when I am only getting one sixteenth of that (I always was good at fractions)  And that I wasnt very happy at all with the service since they obviously knew this at the start and noone saw fit to tell me, or did they even know what they were (or wernt as it were) selling me.

RESULT ! woohoo. They are sending me a dongle    I can plug it in my laptop, diagnostics on my area say that it averages around 7Mbps, as it uses the same network as Vodaphone mobile. I always wanted a dongle  I can use it anywhere with my laptop or in fact any computer, and it is all free of charge, as they cant give me any better via fixed phone line that they installed only 6 months ago. He did say that they are renewing the exchange lines next March tho he realises thats not really of use 

waffle waffle waffle, I am in geek heaven, maybe now I can watch my Iplayer instead of starting on my whole Buffy collection AGAIN

You might be interested to check out what you are really getting for your broadband money ! I used  http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk Yes, what an amazing googling imagination I have 

[Uncle Matt]

That's interesting Barefoot...

I did a test, and it came out at 2,616kbit/sec down and 375 up.

I checked my router too, and it's reporting 7,168 down and 448 up.

I did some downloads last night, and it was absolutely abysmal. Was only a bit faster than dialup.

It depends a lot on how many other people are on at the same time, I think.

Good result all the same though

Kindest Regards,

Matt

[andyb]

Hi B.I.T.P. and Matt 

I'm (apparently) on the Virgin Media 20 Mbps fibre optic service but I've never achieved much more than 8.4 Mbps according to the OOKLA tester. VMedia tell me it's because of 'contention issues' so you are correct there Matty - it varies with the number of users on your node at the same time.

I just ran Barefoot's tester and got the following results:

Download 7016 kbps
Upload 676 kbps

At least this would appear to be better than the ADSL equivalent. It saith:
'Judging by your distance from this exchange, the maximum speed you are likely to achieve with standard ADSL is 6Mbps'

andyb

[Uncle Matt]

I was doing some FTP a while ago, and it was reporting an average of over 700kilobytes per second over the entire download.

This works out to 5,600 kilobits/second, which is pretty darned good.

I still like the idea of fibre optic though.

[Celery Peach]

  I am still awaiting my Dongle, hopefully today, but I am at the mercy of Royal Mail 

Just for my reference, I have checked my speed three times now at different times of day and the best I got was  480 Kbps    The robbing swines. Well, I have allready got nearly all my Bill credited because the service has been overall shoddy (my business was without phone for nearly two weeks !) and I kicked off. So I cant grumble too much, the connection served my purpose up til about 2 weeks ago so its not so bad...perhaps they have just connected some greedy bandwidth snaffler on my line (somewhere in the 4 miles to the exchange)

Will be interesting to see how much bandwidth I actually get with the Dongle.

Just shows you what they get away with if you dont actually check tho eh ? Customer service rang back yesterday and I have cancelled the fault, and told her what the problem actually was, I dont think she understood what I was even saying, why then are these people selling the product Beats me

[andyb]

....perhaps they have just connected some greedy bandwidth snaffler on my line (somewhere in the 4 miles to the exchange)

This rings a bell - the engineer who came to sort out my MODEM problem told me that since recordable DVD drives and dtv hard disk recorders came along they have found no end of people downloading movies - and then selling them on dvd 

Apparently, in Stevenage (I think) where they were investigating bandwidth problem complaints, they found a dozen such machines in one house alone, all merrily downloading on-demand movies ready for pirating on...

I dont think she understood what I was even saying

..and vice versa - especially if the call centre is outside the UK - or even up North somewhere in the UK (Glasgow and Newcastle/Sunderland call centres I have a particular problem understanding....) 

Let us know how your Dongle.. er dongles? when it arrives, BITP

andyb