Your internet BB speed ?

[hellymedic]

A fast speed for me on wonderful BT in Londonton...

[Bledlow]

Virgin via Maidenhead is pretty consistent. I just got 9.85/0.47. I'm paying for 10.

[2_Flat_Erics]

I have never had total faith in one shot online speed testers. You really need to run the test several times at different times of day. Also use several different test sites and then average them all to get an idea of your true speed. If the site is paticularly busy you can get an unrealistically low speed and at other times you may see what appears an unrealistically high result.

Case in point...



and five minutes later



and again a few minutes later



I'm on a virgin 10Mb link. I know that the test can be a little off depending on how many bits the tester thinks there are in a byte and bytes in a Kb etc but 118Mb off is just trying to massage my ego 

[hellymedic]

Whereas I repeated my test 10 minutes after the first and had results within about 1% of my initial test...

[hellymedic]

A different flavour of cr*p...

[Greenbank]

It's probably a badly written test that's cached the stuff on the download test - hence the unrealistically fast results of subsequent tests.

It's not buffering.

If you look closely, the test reports the connection speed as the speed it was reading right at the end of the test, not the average over the entire test.

Also, the speed reported is the speed at which it is read off the TCP socket once received by the computer (it obviously has to have arrived down the wire to be read) but it means that if you make your computer busy enough during the early parts of the test program execution then you can get an artificially high reading once the computer is free enough to catch up with the data that has already been received by it.

This, coupled with the first bit of detail means that artificially high scores are easy to get.

If I repeat the test 5 or 6 times I get results anywhere from 15 to 120.

[Gruff]

£12 a month, truly unlimited downloads, with no installation fee, first 3 months free, and £50 cashback for signing up in the first place. I've not ever seen a deal even remotely that good from anyone else.

O2 (rebadged Be network).

[Sergeant Pluck]

Work:

Home:

[microphonie]

Pretty much the same as it's been whenever I've tested the line over the last 2-3 years.

It'll do for what I need the pc for. Processing power is what my pc is lacking - it takes an age to boot-up these days.

[Jaded]

For which we pay a lot.

[tonycollinet]

Peak time



It'll be faster later on.



I was right - 5 minutes later

[hugo15]

Hmmm....... not very fast    Although we aren't out in the sticks we live miles from the exchange.

[rusky]

Hmmm....... not very fast    Although we aren't out in the sticks we live miles from the exchange.

You would be better off with a couple of plastic cups at each end of a damp piece of string!

[Chris S]

You know how when you get into the countryside, you can smell shit? Don't worry about it, it's just the smell of FAIL out here in the wilds:

[Greenbank]

Home:-



That's with the BB synched at 6654kbps and 1192kbps.

[hellymedic]

Apart from Chris S and Hugo,
I HATE YOU ALL!
I'M GOING TO THKWEAM AND THKWEAM AND MAKE MYTHELF THICK!

IT'TH NOT FAIR!

[nicknack]

Courtesy of Virgin

[LEE]

In practical terms though, where do higher download speeds stop being an advantage?

You are after all dependent on the bandwidth of the remote server, Photobucket, YACF, ITunes or whatever.

A high bandwidth in the office may allow 100 people to each grab a slice of a 100Meg connection but you may still be downloading from a server with a 10Meg connection.  

Having never tried downloading, say, a 10MB podcast using >100Mb connection, is it really 10x quicker than a 10Mb connection?

I'm surprised to see a Web development company with such poor bandwidth, I'd have thought that sort of performance could have an adverse effect on your business.

I cancelled my free trial of 20Mb (18Mb donwload speed) and reverted to my 10Mb because I couldn't see any significant difference.

[Woofage]

Bit quicker this morning

[Chris (was scych)]

Apart from Chris S and Hugo,
I HATE YOU ALL!
I'M GOING TO THKWEAM AND THKWEAM AND MAKE MYTHELF THICK!

IT'TH NOT FAIR!

I had the same issue with BT. Very slow. The contention ratio is too high (too many people trying to use the same bandwidth at the same time. If you can get O2 (Be Broadband) at your exchange then consider changing to them. They use ADSL2+ which offers faster upload and download speeds. They're also very good at customer service. A lot better than BT ever were with me.

In the new house we were quoted by BT as being able to get up to 1 Mb/s download speeds. We went with Be and the router is currently showing 5 Mb/s (realistically it's 4 - 4.5 Mb/s at peak times).

[ian]

The bad news: BE broadband is not technically-compatible with the type of landline you currently have.

Which is always the case. Even if they have equipment in the exchange that has briefly sniffed the future, I appear to be doomed to 3Mbps by a length of string cheese stretched between our house and exchange.

Also appears to give us the choice of BT, BT, or BT. I'm like a cream trim phone too, please.

And the fucking laughing Virgin crowd can stopping pushing leaflets promising broadband speeds faster than light itself through my letterbox. Not to me, you can't, so please desist or I replace my string cheese wiring with Richard Branson's stretched out entrails. Let's see how many megabits per second that handles.

[Jaded]

O2 are weasels with a download limit that isn't in their paperwork or selling material. This on a premium account that was costing way more than the base level one.

Singularly unhelpful too.

And the f'wits still send me survey links asking me to rate their broadband service.

[Ham]

In practical terms though, where do higher download speeds stop being an advantage?

You are after all dependent on the bandwidth of the remote server, Photobucket, YACF, ITunes or whatever.

A high bandwidth in the office may allow 100 people to each grab a slice of a 100Meg connection but you may still be downloading from a server with a 10Meg connection.  

Having never tried downloading, say, a 10MB podcast using >100Mb connection, is it really 10x quicker than a 10Mb connection?

I'm surprised to see a Web development company with such poor bandwidth, I'd have thought that sort of performance could have an adverse effect on your business.

I cancelled my free trial of 20Mb (18Mb donwload speed) and reverted to my 10Mb because I couldn't see any significant difference.

Yes.

A couple of reasons:

1 - You can multitask without it impacting anything
2 - There are some servers out there you can hit out of peak time and get a full-bore download. It is really quite awesome to see.
3 - Oh yes. Bragging rights

(My 50mb speed is at home, courtesy of Virgin Cable)

[2_Flat_Erics]

In practical terms though, where do higher download speeds stop being an advantage?

You are after all dependent on the bandwidth of the remote server, Photobucket, YACF, ITunes or whatever.

A high bandwidth in the office may allow 100 people to each grab a slice of a 100Meg connection but you may still be downloading from a server with a 10Meg connection.  

Having never tried downloading, say, a 10MB podcast using >100Mb connection, is it really 10x quicker than a 10Mb connection?

I'm surprised to see a Web development company with such poor bandwidth, I'd have thought that sort of performance could have an adverse effect on your business.

I cancelled my free trial of 20Mb (18Mb donwload speed) and reverted to my 10Mb because I couldn't see any significant difference.

The speed you get to download something at is only ever going to be as fast as the slowest link between you and the server your downloading from. Realistically these days the slowest part of the link is often the last hop between your provider and you.

For normal day to day web browsing and average emails an 8 or 10Mb link is more than enough. Once you start downloading full DVD's and streaming high def video then you start to feel the benefit of higher bandwidths. The question to ask is does it really matter to me that it takes an hour or two to download a full DVD or do I really need it in a few minutes? Personally I did the same as you and took a step backwards from 20Mb to 10Mb because on the few occasions I do download a large file then a few extra minutes is not going to be the end of the world.

[Kim]

In practical terms though, where do higher download speeds stop being an advantage?

Assuming an uncontended link, and simple http-style downloads, I reckon somewhere in the region of 10Mb.  In practice I only regularly manage to saturate our 16Mb connection using bittorrent (so lots of downloads from different places in parallel) or the IPv6 Ubuntu mirror.

Of course the next big thing will be streaming HD video, which needs a little more than that to work comfortably.

Of course, add more users, or a requirement to keep some bandwidth free for phone calls or other latency-sensitive uses, and more speed becomes beneficial.

In practical terms there also tends to be a correlation between higher download speed and higher upload speed when it comes to commercially available services, so often the cheapest way to get more upload is to pay for more download than you otherwise need.