Broadband speeds

[Mike]

Talking of Broadband speeds Virgin Media customers might have noticed a bit of a 'slow' service on Monday / Tuesday as they managed to make a mistake during a routine maintenance of their broadband in the North West, Yorkshire and Midlands. All their set top boxes and routers managed to loose their leased IP, thus meaning they had to request a new one which overloaded the servers. The system was reset mid day on Tuesday to restore service. BBC Article.

[Mike]

The BBC are reporting that the Broadband market is about to become unregulated. This might be a problem with the whole not showing the correct broadband speeds on their advertising!

[Mike]

Speed Test is a website that you can use to test the speed of your broadband connection. It is very cool and you could use it to try and batter your service provider to improve their level of service.

[Mike]

This is the result of my speed test at home to maidenhead. Not too bad, I am nearly getting the full on 8mb broadband! Rock on. What are your figures?



This is the result of my speed test at home to Cyprus. Not too shabby either!

[Mike]

CNet are reporting that Virgin will be using some cool technical giggery pokery (technical term you will notice) to get 4 times the capacity out of their existing cables which is pretty cool. They are going to be the first company to offer 40GB downloads without having to rip up their existing cables and lay new and improved ones.

[Mike]

Well the new work has full speed 512mb broadband for six people. That explains the slowness of the connection!

[stimpsonslostson]

Not that I'm competitive at all... I scored-
9266kb/s Down
8522kb/s Up.

Gotta love those university servers!
p

[Mike]

Love the synchronous upload / download speeds there. You don't get them often. The really impressive thing is that these are the speeds for every single computer on the campus. . . . they must spend a fortune on their internet connections!

[BarcelonAl]

The uni's are connected to JANET (Joint Academic Network) which forms is basically a super-fast connection running the length of the country. As such they probably pay very little for their connection compared to the rest of us on BT's copper cable!

This is work's speed to Maidenhead:

[Mike]

That 19mb connection is impressive. Phil we have a winner unless someone else manages to get above 19mb. . . I think Al Ogle is the only candidate who is likely to be able to match that one.

[Mike]

Check this bad boy out. Within 10 minutes the broadband was working. The speed has practically doubled on O2 and is blisteringly fast! The longest part of that 10 minute set up was dismantling the BT box (6 minutes), 2 minutes to take the O2 out of its packaging and plugging in, 2 minutes for it to go through it's set up sequence. Wicked.

[Mike]

The DSL Zone site is pretty good for finding this type of info out.

I just re-checked that site and it says I should be good to get 2mb out of my internet connection. . . . erm. Well one of the two above sites must be wrong, from experience I hope it is the DLS Zone UK website.

[BarcelonAl]

Hmm...strange! One says your getting 11mb...the other that you should only get 2mb!

[Mike]

The 11mb is much closer to reality. I am actually on ADSL 2 as I discovered when browsing through the O2 wireless box settings. I think that probably makes some of the difference even though I am not sure what the difference is (save the speed!)

[Mike]

BDP internet speed test. Despite getting over 9Mbs the internet seems slow because I am using IE 7.0 and there is no way to get Firefox onto my computer. That doesn't half suck because there is no spelling check in IE. Doh! Like the syncronous upload speed, I guess that is sort of required to connect to our centrilised server. I guess that the speed is actually capped to each work station to prevent someone hogging the whole connection (or being a cheat and actually using it to download using a p2p client).