talkmagic.co.uk

Bits per second, that is... What did you think I meant?

This is a bit of a heads up. I've been asked to write something about broadband speeds, so I thought I'd better check my own. Crikey! According to this utility, http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/ I'm getting nowhere near what I'm paying for. Grrr...

LMAO!!! Great title Tomo!!

I'm a bit of an IT nerd by day (and a caped crime fighting magician by night ) and might be able to help a little;

The actual speed you get has a lot to do with various factors but if you read closely you'll usually find that you're paying for "Up to 8Mbps" speed.

Things like how far away from the main telecom hub you are or the quality of cabling (inside and outside your house) can have a big effect on the speeds you get.

The biggest thing that determines your actual speed has to do with "Contention Ratios" Typical ratios are 50:1 or 100:1. What this basically means is how many people are using the same network switch on your ISP in your local area, as the total bandwidth available is divided between that many of their customers. During peak times (6pm - 11pm) you can easily see your 8Mb connection drop to below 1Mbps. However 4am is a great time to achieve maximum speeds.

If your connection is always significantly slower that you are paying for the best thing to do is record the speed results over 2 or 3 days at different times of the day (morning, afternoon, evening and night), document your findings and approach your ISP about this, a call to their support line is probably the best approach.

Try not to be too confrontational with them but put your point across in a calm and reasonable way and they will do what they can to help.

You'll probably find that someone in your area is a download fiend and is abusing BitTorrent or something, and your ISP will have ways of dealing with them.

I hope this helps!

Being a country bumpkin, I am told I can only get 1 Meg.

I was with 'BT home something or other' which was, in practice, turning out to be well below 1 Meg. I then had to change to 'BT business' (for other reasons) and my actual speed shot up to about 1.3 - 1.5. Hoorah!

Much better contention ratio I suppose, a nice side effect of having to upgrade though.

I get 512kb for my money. By my calculation this is slightly slower than what I'd get by using a team of trained mice doing line-of-sight relay semaphore (a solution that's sadly impractical due to the lamentable attention span of the average rodent).

Until the whole system goes fiber or mobile broadband becomes a viable option I'm stuffed.

I have a 1meg connection and my lowest recorded download speed over a two week period, was 0.3. Highest was 0.8 and I averaged about 0.6. Bit rubbish really.

Most (all?) broadband suppliers have their fair use policies and will restrict your speeds if you use up what they see as 'unfair' amounts of bandwidth in peak hours. They usually suggest you access the internet in the middle of the night to avoid being restricted.

All in all, I think I'm going to quietly stick with my crumby old 0.5Mb/s line with it's data throughput of 64KB/s. It's good enough to watch iPlayer and on4. It takes a while to download large files, but it has no usage restrictions.

In researching this article, I've found that a lot of cheap broadband deals charge you a whopping great fee if you leave in the first 12 months. That can be the same as paying an extra 3 months! Check your small print chaps.

They all restrict usage unlimited broadband is a myth its in the small print under "FAIR USE".

Well, I've downloaded multiple Linux distributions, taking up my entire pipe for several days on end without a problem. Then again, my agreement is 5 years old in a couple of months, so it may date to a time before usage restrictions.

George Chan wrote:They all restrict usage unlimited broadband is a myth its in the small print under "FAIR USE".

You got that right. Check out this link...

http://www.plus.net/unlimited_broadband/

Tomo wrote:Bits per second, that is... What did you think I meant?
.

I naturally assumed you meant dietry fibre

mine came out at 1573 kbps for downloads, and 59 for uploads...

is that any cop?

This won't help becasue it is in the States, but here goes.

This pretty much pertains to cable subscribers

Naturally there are going to be peaks and valleys in speeds. However if you are at signicantly slower speeds you need to contact your cable provider for a few reasons.

First you may have signal losses. FCC only allowes for a certain amount of signal leaks. Providers sometimes must shut down equipment if they cannot contact the customers to schedule a call. Second somebody may be stealing signal from you which would result in slower speeds. Third the Cable company I've been working at provides enough signal for each fiber optic node to handle however modems they put on the node. They also provide enough signal for each household to run 5 pieces of equipment without loose of connectivity. So all house holds can run 4 digital boxes and one modem. If the customer wants more then this company will gladly put in an additional amplifier on the line at a cost to the customer.


I have pretty fast service because I am in the middle of nowhere. there are only 22 modems on my node my max upstream bandwidth is 384 kbps. Max Downstream is 6600 kpps. Upstream frequency is 30 MHZ and Downstream frequency is 723 MHZ

Cable company is smart as they don't guarantee upstream bandwidth.

What can really slow you down is the trackroute. For example I just traced my ping and it went through 11 different systems in 4 states in a total of 66.579 ms. Not sure what ms is, milliseconds perhaps?

Now that you are all bored I'll leave you to your rest.