Networks Broadband speeds - is this accurate?

[MaZ]

Originally Posted by Krikkit

Which bit of Mancs are you in? The Moss Side exchange (which serves allsorts of places in the centre) is LLU'd to the hilt, then again the one which serves M2 postcodes (down by Oxford Road station) isn't. Go figure.

I'm actually in second part of my location ATM which is the Isle of Wight (damn parents! - back to uni on thursday)

It seems quite a lot of the island is quite clued up when it comes to broadband and a large number of people have it where I am in Cowes at least, lucky to get over 100k/sec on 8mbit line here at any time that's not 1am - 7am

As for Manchester though, I was on the Rusholme exchange for a couple of years, firstly in Victoria Park area (upper brook street), about 600m from the exchange and getting full on 8mbit with UK-Online then moved down into Fallowfield on same exchange (A good mile or so straight line distance) and switched to Be*, where I was getting about 14-15mbit down (last year this was). I hear this year though the rusholme exchange has been totally overloaded for Be* LLU services though so I think it's gone down quite a bit since I was using it

Have now been on virgin 20mbit since September (moved in with a friend) and can't really complain apart from the 3gb peak cap, generally hit max speeds outside of the cap time after we got the cable modem upgraded (had it since old NTL era and it could hardly handle 10mbit lol).

As for the speed estimators anyway, I'm not exactly sure how they work; I know at least some of the calculation is based upon what services you can or can't receive in your area (with some level of innacuracy seeing as it's missing a load of LLU providers), but the biggest speed limiter surely is your line stats / length of line, and I can't see there being a giant database with every phone number in the countries' line stats available for checking?

Also just adding incase no-one's heard of it before but http://www.samknows.com/broadband/ is probably the best site there is for details on exchanges and LLU availability and such (although I'd expect people here to know of it )

[Krikkit]

Originally Posted by MaZ

As for Manchester though, I was on the Rusholme exchange for a couple of years, firstly in Victoria Park area (upper brook street), about 600m from the exchange and getting full on 8mbit with UK-Online then moved down into Fallowfield on same exchange (A good mile or so straight line distance) and switched to Be*, where I was getting about 14-15mbit down (last year this was). I hear this year though the rusholme exchange has been totally overloaded for Be* LLU services though so I think it's gone down quite a bit since I was using it

I was on the Rusholme exchange last year (I think at least), and it was fine, although I could've been on the Moss Side one then too. I was down Moss Lane East last year (or thereabouts) so a bit closer to the M-S one, but now I'm in Victoria Park (place, not halls) and apparently I'm still on the same exchange, even though Rusholme will be nearer.

[MaZ]

Originally Posted by Krikkit

I was on the Rusholme exchange last year (I think at least), and it was fine, although I could've been on the Moss Side one then too. I was down Moss Lane East last year (or thereabouts) so a bit closer to the M-S one, but now I'm in Victoria Park (place, not halls) and apparently I'm still on the same exchange, even though Rusholme will be nearer.

IIRC Rusholme exchange is right at the bottom of rusholme on dickenson road so it _should_ be closer to anywhere in victoria park, maybe its because the rusholme one supplies such a large number of places (most of rusholme + a good chunk of victoria park + fallowfield + levenshulme + ladybarn)?

Anyway, have to go with cable in Levenshulme cos we're probably 2.5 miles from the closest exchange (levenshulme) and that bodes rather poorly for LLU'd ADSL2

[Krikkit]

Originally Posted by MaZ

IIRC Rusholme exchange is right at the bottom of rusholme on dickenson road so it _should_ be closer to anywhere in victoria park, maybe its because the rusholme one supplies such a large number of places (most of rusholme + a good chunk of victoria park + fallowfield + levenshulme + ladybarn)?

Anyway, have to go with cable in Levenshulme cos we're probably 2.5 miles from the closest exchange (levenshulme) and that bodes rather poorly for LLU'd ADSL2

Oh I know where you mean! I'm definately closer to the Rusholme one, but that's a great example of mad bureaucracy for you!

[MaZ]

Originally Posted by Krikkit

Oh I know where you mean! I'm definately closer to the Rusholme one, but that's a great example of mad bureaucracy for you!

Just behind the pub (hardys well)

Well yeah to be fair anyway, Manchester has been pretty good to me so far for broadband. First year of uni sucked cos I was in one of the Owens Park halls that didn't have uni internet, but 8mbit UK-O and then Be* (who installed in under 6 days in the middle of september ), and this year Virgin who have been pretty good also - faster speeds than Be* but more crap with the 3gb limit and some curiously random downtimes, and deciding to do maintenance at like 1-5am or something which we all know is student time .

I've got so used to having fast internet it sucks when I go home