News Gap between actual and advertised broadband speed widens

On plusnet with a BT wet string line max 7MB getting 6.4MB no throttling at anytime

 

I like cheesecake and with Virgin, I can get as many pictures or videos of cheesecake as I like. I'm paying for 30 Mbps and last night I downloaded two iPlayer videos at a combined rate of between 28 and 31 Mbps.

Without using cliches, Virgin does exactly what it says on the... err.. advert.

Except I've started getting huge latency problems on WoW in the evenings. Can still download videos at ~30 Mbps but can't do MMOs

 

Location: Leicestershire
ISP: TalkTalk
Advertised : Up to 20Mb/s (they told us to expect 2Mb/s when we signed up)
Actual Speed : 300KB/s (or whatever it is, ) So that's around 2.5Mb/s I think.

 

Virgin Cable Cheesecake!

advertised: 30mb
actual: 29mb
location: essex

 

BT. 20 Mbps down, 1.5 Mbps up. End up get ting 12 Mbps down, 1Mbps up. If they think you're excessively using (>50GB/mo from torrents), they throttle your connection to half for the next 30 days. Really annoys me when that happens as it has trouble with iPlayer in HD at that speed.

Central Oxford, but no plans for super Virgin speeds here.

 

I feel your pain! I live out near the Wolds and I get a solid 1.5Mbps! Though according to a survey of my village, the next fastest connection is 0.25, which makes me feel a bit better ...

 

Eclipse.

Promised 40 down, 2 up. Speedtest.net tells me I get 35 down and 1 up, at least to Kent.

Less impressively, I get 6 down and 0.3 up to Los Angeles.

Numbers to the exchange are easy. Actually connecting you to somewhere useful is harder.

 

I'm on Virgin Media 10mbit, and I get 10mbit down, 1mbit up so exactly what it says on the tin. I don't get any slowdowns or throttling, even in the evenings so it must depend on which UBR you're on (Stretford for me).

I'm hoping to upgrade to 30mbit as soon as they release the bridge mode firmware for the Superhub.

 

its all about the 'Traffic management' policy. 50m speed is meaningless if you cant stream iplayer HD at peak times.

 

p.s. im on Be broadband and i measure up at about 18m but when i press play on an online video even at prime times that £$%^ plays mother lovers!

 

I live in Lincoln. on talk talk though i live about (well i can spit on the exchange) but 20mb advertised and 18mb(ish) actual isn't bad but here's the kicker

Virgin Media will not connect my building because they say it will cost to much yet the green box thing is about 20 yards away and My building when it was rebuilt was wired for DIAMOND CABLE. They say it will cost £20,000 to connect my building to their system and connecting the building will not be financially viable despite the 70(ish) households wanting virgin media services

 

Went from dial up which was painfully slow so as soon as broadband came about I Started on BT when broadband just started, then went to eclipse because of the stingy FUP BT brought in & then eventually eclipse went all FUP on us, then bethere which was true unlimited but was supposed to be a 25MB/s connection but was 4 to 8MB/s I got annoyed with this recently because the crappy speeds plus the unreliable connection was keeping me offline way too much, to get an ok speed of 8MB/s I had to plug the modem straight to the test socket & configure the bethere website to run on high speed, they have a few choices gaming mode on/off, high speed, normal & reliable & had to keep it on reliable which gave 4MB/s if not plugged into the test socket, plugged into the test socket I got 6MB/s.

So after finding out the unlimited usage had been lifted from BT at last I jumped at the chance to switch back to BT for the fibre optic broadband & it rocks , had a hiccup from the engineer they sent to do it though, he unplugged the phone extensions so had to mess around on the phone to the foreign support which creates more misscommunications all around but got there eventually after many calls & they sent a permanent engineer around to fix it & he said for all the temp or agency engineers they send out they have to get a perm engineer out to clean up after them .

Enough blah, this is my readings for how mine is now & I'm impressed for once I'm getting more than they said I'd get, they said I'd get 32MB/s but this is nice as I'm getting more .

 

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1404872254.png

i hate you all

in fairness, when we joined our ISP we were only promised 0.5mb, but it does still feel like being shafted somewhat.

basically, they have an exchange in the town where i live, it's towards the south of the town. they built several thousand new homes on the north side of the town. all these homes are serviced by the old exchange.

what's even more annoying is when the houses were built the cabling for NTL (as it was then) was all laid down, all the houses have the box, and NTL was present in the town. for 3 years we had no broadband up here atall, yet they made no effort to extend, and still haven't so we're limited to crappy services with crappy speeds from an exchange that's just too far away.

suffice to say i want to punch my friends when they complain they're only getting 10mb.

 

I think what's worse is the places offering "unlimited" bandwidth but when you actually read the fine print you get only 1 GB per month. It's downright insulting.

 

Along the same lines, I saw an advert today for Sky's "unlimited" broadband, truly unlimited they say. They also say it's "up to 20Mb", which strikes me as a limit.

 

0.8Mb in the sticks

 

20mb i get 19 virgin media 4TW

 

We just switched to cable from DSl.

DSL...
We paid for 10, but were told to expect under 8 due to distance, 4-10meg was the same price. We got 6.

Cable... (Which cost half as much...)
We pay for 16 and in off hours we get 32, during peak it can slow to 15 or so, which is still great for the area.

 

yeah dsl speed is restricted to how far you are from the central office.. so it can vary

if your way out you can still get 3 down- but it could vary on the very end to around 2.6

but if your on the end and buy the cheaper package.. 1.5, you should get 1.5

it's a lottery really.. depending on where the switcher station is at

 

Ontario Canada, Cogeco: Pay (obscene amount) for 20, get 1 to 2 max. We are also capped at 60 Gb per month and are "traffic shaped". Cogeco is also one of the best cable internet companies around. My buddies with rogers have to suffer through "deep packet inspection" and 20Gb per month limits. There is also no unlimited packages in my province.