Broadband reccomendations

[dieselboy]

O2 use ASDL2 technology I think, meaning twice as quick on a copper line compared to ADSL they also don't do any bandwidth shaping which a lot of providers now seem to do (BT)

its ADSL2+ and is capable of 24mbit down and over 2mbit up. its provided as an unbundled service in the exchange and is part of "be" broadband

its great. i used to get 14mbit down from my 8meg service for the first 2 months when i joined. this was the training period and was only supposed to last a week

[dieselboy]

I'm on 10Mb Virgin. (Remember, Mb = Mega Bits, not Mega Bytes.)



Can't grumble.

bits and bytes are very confusing. especially when different companies read Mb and MB as being the same things.

in real terms, 8 megabit download should mean you see a theoretical maximum of 1megabyte/second. or 1000kb/s
people seem to average around the 6mbit mark though which would equate to 750kb/s. however speedtest websites convert this to bits and not bytes since you are measuring the bit rate ie speed.

[dieselboy]

I'm on 10mb and the above result is what I'm actually getting!

They then have the nerve to send a letter asking if I want to upgrade to 20mb. Cheeky blighters.

truthfully i have found speedtest website to lie sometimes. i have seen stupidly high results from speedtest.net and other times some stupidly low.

if you want to know the best way to test your broadband, then go to microsoft.com and go to their free trials and downloads section. open two windows so you can choose two downloads simultaneously that are over 500mbytes. when you have found two, download both of them at the same time and windows will show the download speed for each if you are using Internet Explorer.
leave these running for 30 seconds or so and you will have two figures apprx the same rate.
if you add these two numbers together then this is the combined download speed.

or if you cant do that then try some other broadband sites like www.thinkbroadband.co.uk