Speed

[grahamb]

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/broadband-speedtest/

I seem to get more than 5 but less than 6. Pretty sure I should get a bit more than that...

[Tdm]

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Graham,
All depends on where you are located and how many other Users you are competing with etc.
I have never had more than 1mb but it is not a problem here in Tenerife as I get instantaneous responses on the Internet to most things. Anything above 1mb is not available here at present. I have tried various Broadband Speed Tests and they all give more or less the same results as yours does - I got .836 of a megabyte but that is normal. Also Download speeds tend to differ considerably to Upload speeds - so you need to test both.

[V Mad]

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I am getting 1400 kbps and my ISP provides up to 8000, but I am bet I am limited by the phone line/exchange rather than the provider but how would I find out.

[AlanD]

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Hi,

BT can put a booster on your line, they dont like to admit that they can, and they dont like to do it. it took me 3 weeks of moaning and the threat of Oftel. it boosted mine from 0.5 to 14.
BT are crafty, if you have a new line like mine no one will provide under 1 meg, so you are left with BT!! i know they record the calls so i explained i knew what they were doing and why, then all of a sudden i had 14 meg, orange said it was one of the highest they had seen.it depends on the exchange you are on and how far away you are too. i was only 3 miles away.
there are internet sites that will tell you how fast it should it be and how far away you from the exchange.

[AlanD]

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sorry i forgot to say,
sky take you from the BT exchange and put you on theirs, they dont tell you this, they should as its in the contract that they have told you. be careful and read the small print, if you ever want to cancel sky you have to pay BT for a complete new line, and a number change!! this will cost 128 quid!
i pay Orange 10 quid line rental and 7 for the broardband. free calls wends and evenings total 19 pm with vat and a line speed of 14 meg. no delay as soon as i click a page its there.

[Des N]

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Swapped from BT (usually around 3mb max) to Virgin fibre-optic cable and now get 6-8 mb. Got £125 cash back too, so shop around and check theMartin Lewis website. You do have to be in an area which was NTL cable as Virgin took them over.

[Ian Durrant]

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sky take you from the BT exchange and put you on theirs, they dont tell you this, they should as its in the contract that they have told you. be careful and read the small print, if you ever want to cancel sky you have to pay BT for a complete new line, and a number change!! this will cost 128 quid!

It certainly is not meant to happen this way! Sky do put you on their LLU (Local Loop Unbundled) equipment (which is more advanced than the equipment BT have in the majority of their exchanges), however the copper pair from the exchange to your house remains unchanged. If you take sky phone as well as sky broadband, they will also transfer the phone line (as well as the broadband) to them. However you can switch back, BT and sky are required by law to allow the transfer of your existing number in either direction and if you have ever had a complete new line fitted then BT ripped you off big time!!!!!!

Not sure where this idea of a "broadband booster" comes from as it doesn't exist. There are two adsl systems in use in the UK, ADSL G.DMT and ADSL 2+. Bt have almost no ADSL 2+ enabled exchanges, but where they do they can move your broadband to an ADSL 2+ line card. However this would only give you a faster speed if your line is relatively short and of good quality. If you went from 0.5Meg to 14Meg then your original speed was artificially restricted to 0.5 and they simply removed the restriction and moved you to adsl 2+.

ADSL G.DMT is up to 8meg and ADSL 2+ is up to 24Meg (though some providers only quote up to 16 as to get 24 you would have to be living in or above the telephone exchange) There is no way a line on G.dmt running at 0.5 meg (that wasn't artificially restricted) could get 14 Meg, its just not possible unless you either moved your house closer to the exchange or had a fault on the copper that BT have since fixed.

[Andy Rundell]

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I have always used a different site to measure my connection speed:

http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/

but i suspect it will be similar to the one you are using.

I pay for 'up to' 20Mb - virgin cable, i am anorak enough to test it fairly regularly - not just when it makes the news(but not sad enough to record all the results over a long period of time in a spreadsheet and graph it )

My minimum speeds are around 5mbs, usually between 7 and 9, and i have on a few occasions seen 14-15mbs which i was very impressed with. These are download speeds, upload is still a bit cr%p - only 750kps

............Andy

[DJT]

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I am with Orange 'up to 8 Meg' through a BT line. The little icon in the RH corner tells me I am receiving 4.6Mbps, but the website Andy has posted tells me I am actually receiving 2.4Mbps with an upload speed of 375Kbps. Not brilliant, but I get by.

Dave

[grahamb]

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Ian Durrant wrote:

sky take you from the BT exchange and put you on theirs, they dont tell you this, they should as its in the contract that they have told you. be careful and read the small print, if you ever want to cancel sky you have to pay BT for a complete new line, and a number change!! this will cost 128 quid!

It certainly is not meant to happen this way! Sky do put you on their LLU (Local Loop Unbundled) equipment (which is more advanced than the equipment BT have in the majority of their exchanges), however the copper pair from the exchange to your house remains unchanged. If you take sky phone as well as sky broadband, they will also transfer the phone line (as well as the broadband) to them. However you can switch back, BT and sky are required by law to allow the transfer of your existing number in either direction and if you have ever had a complete new line fitted then BT ripped you off big time!!!!!!

Not sure where this idea of a "broadband booster" comes from as it doesn't exist. There are two adsl systems in use in the UK, ADSL G.DMT and ADSL 2+. Bt have almost no ADSL 2+ enabled exchanges, but where they do they can move your broadband to an ADSL 2+ line card. However this would only give you a faster speed if your line is relatively short and of good quality. If you went from 0.5Meg to 14Meg then your original speed was artificially restricted to 0.5 and they simply removed the restriction and moved you to adsl 2+.

ADSL G.DMT is up to 8meg and ADSL 2+ is up to 24Meg (though some providers only quote up to 16 as to get 24 you would have to be living in or above the telephone exchange) There is no way a line on G.dmt running at 0.5 meg (that wasn't artificially restricted) could get 14 Meg, its just not possible unless you either moved your house closer to the exchange or had a fault on the copper that BT have since fixed.

Hi there, dont tell BT that this broadband speed booster doesnt exist as they have it on their website for sale...

There are lots of different dsl products out there, each of which has different features. The line is the limiting factor but this can be overcome by a process called bonding (combining of pairs) which leaves price as the main determining factor in how fast or not you go. The issue is when you pay a premium but still get budget imho.

[Seaking]

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if you can live with cordless phones as extensions.disconnect wire number 3 from main socket (bell wire) and this can help in some cases.

[Ian Durrant]

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Bonding is not speed boosting, for a start it requires two separate copper circuits to your house and that means two phone lines and therefore two standing charges. Additionally IIRC BT have just been slapped down by the ASA over their claims. Adsl 2+ or adsl2+ annexe M or any of the other adsl 2+ services are not speed boosting either, they are a more advanced technology that can, in the right conditions, give higher speeds. So actually there are only two standards of ADSL over POTS (plain old telephone system) and they are adsl and adsl 2+. I'll forget FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) for this discussion as currently it's only availalable in Billericay Essex and maybe a couple of other town that are in the testing scheme.

The bell wire trick is worth a try too, but its not just cordless phones, its any phone without a mechanical bell.

[Ian Durrant]

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Oh I just thought, if you are talking about the Iplate (an adaptor that fits in your phone socket) then all that does is filter the bell wire, its only 80% as effective as just disconnecting the bell wire. BT have claimed that as a speedbooster too, which frankly is about as honest marketing as claiming their hub is better than any other draft n wifi router!

[chippa]

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Hi ,

Speed testing your service is fine but will only give you an indication of what your speed is ( its dependent on several variants ). for more accurate results contact your isp and ask them if they have a local test server you can ping to (most usually have one for their engineers to test to), typically it would located at the end the isp's network before they present your data, traffic on to the http://www.

Regards

[line]