UK way behind pack on broadband speed in Europe While superfast fibre lobbyists continue to try and push nations around the world into deploying more nimble broadband networks, a report out today showed a 7 per cent slip in average global connection speeds between the second and third quarter of 2012. Content delivery outfit Akamai revealed its latest analysis relating to …
I'd question these stats, why was the fastest connection blatantly slower than anybody on a decent cable or fibre connection.
As for the up-to, just choose a provider who offers an estimate, and ignore the up-to, and ignore the cheap packages, as they will prioritise you out during congestion. If they fail to deliver the estimate ensure you can cancel the agreement/contract, and based on recent news avoid Sky.
Follow those rules and all but the most unfortunate 10% should be capable of sustaining a connection that can stream a few 720p media streams.
Many of the streaming problems are also potentially (in the case of Be and iPlayer) a problem with capacity between a service and its connection to ISP infrastructure, this also could be why they seem to have slow speeds, the other reason is that your 70Mbps line is not 70Mbps for streaming, I really don't trust Virgin at all, and they also have capacity problems in some locations.
Finally, if you are not paying for a connection of over 2Mbps, then you really cannot complain about poor speeds, however poor your current speed is it will still probably be 4 times faster than 2Mbps on an up-to 8Mbps line.
I also don't see where all these contention complaints come from, if your speed drops by more than half during busy times (and you are not on Fibre already), and these busy times are most of the day every day, then there is a problem, and changing ISP is a good place to start, or paying more.
I would think that the highest figure quoted is below the fastest connection speed because akamai measured speed of traffic through their network, as a result it will be slowed down by factors like rate limiting on the source server or other traffic on the users connection.
with regard to contention issues and you suggestion being to switch ISP this ignores the exchanges where it makes no difference which isp you are with you are still going over Openreaches connections, if that is over subscribed (fairly common) you are screwed no matter what you do.
my experience of this was moving from a location where a single adsl connection would sync at 8mb but struggle to deliver 1mb (it was the same for the whole area) to a location where a single connection with the same isp (under the same contract) sync's at 7mb and never delivers under 6.5
both locations are served only through openreach, the only difference between them is the quality of the connection from the exchange to the backbone
I haven't seen many places where the service was so poor, the worst was an 8MB line connected over BT to a virgin non-cable service in Coventry, which frequently dropped out or paused, which is really surprising.
We are 1.5 miles from the exchange and still managed 13Mbps on copper with a faulty line of some sort which stopped the 2Mbps upload working.
Contention I thought was governed by the ISP (as you can have 50:1 or 20:1) where does this take effect? how does LLU based services change this type of issue? (honest questions, I don't know) I guess if this is down to a large distance from the cabinet, a cabinet a long way away from the exchange, or a really poor cabinet line it would cause these types of problem, but I really thought such severe problems were limited to more rural areas, and a few patches here and there.
Some of these might be resolved in the above cases by new cabinets or FTTC as it is rolled out more.
I still think a number of popular ISP's and the chosen packages are a major factor in a significant percentage of cases. There is BT broadband or sky broadband in just about every house/flat here, although it's low density buildings (in sim city terms)
I guess I can only go on my experience and generally I have not seen an 8Mbps line transmit at less than 4Mbps in most cases.
The engineer that fitted the openreach modem did say it was the fastest connection he had seen, but I didn't take it seriously given the Virgin and BT both have 80Mbps+ services in theory
My parents live out in the sticks. They used to have less than a megabit line with Plusnet (only through me pushing the SNR margin down to 3 though). It meant downloading anything of significance on bittorrent took a while but at least it was never throttled.
Roll on BT FTTC. They switched to option 1 with the 40GB cap nearly 2 years back because they cannot afford the unlimited package. Now you rarely get a few K downloads speed on torrents at peak times of the day. The only way you can get around it is to either schedule downloads overnight or do what I do at present which is to jump onto the nearest FON/BTWifi/Openzone connection, use their login and download on that at 200-350K. This has the added bonus of not counting against the 40GB cap. Which is a bit silly really.
Also after they lifted the cap on option 2 to unlimited they did bugger all for option 1 users. They could have at least doubled the allowance to 80GB but no. They want to try and get you to upgrade to option 2.
Of course they could switch to Sky FTTC with unlimited (line rental is lower even though the broadband is a couple of quid more so it balances out) but my mother refuses to pay by direct debit for the phone line rental and calls (My father pays separate for the broadband). Sky won't accept anything other than DD where BT at least still allow you to pay cash per quarter if you insist on doing so.
At least I have a workaround for the cap at the moment whilst visiting. But it makes a nonsense of a 40Mbit connection.
I'm glad I didn't go with BT as i didn't trust them, although Plusnet is owned by BT. FTTC has lived up to its reputation for us, the enhanced upload is more important than the extra download
They do offer a premium option too for an extra £5 where you can increase the priority of your P2P and unidentified connections over other users (I expect the unlimited users get priority over budget users too)
I cap torrent downloads at around 1.5MBps down and 100MBps up as courtesy and only run them now and then every few days. Be were very good with torrents (our usage with them was 150-300GB a month)
Eclipse (3 years ago) were terrible, and Sky have recently admitted that they have capacity problems that are affecting some users quite seriously.
Plusnet are the first to offer an unlimited relatively unthrottled connection over fibre for under £30 which I think is really impressive (as long as it stays OK while the contract is running I'm happy)
unless your paying for the higher package on Plusnet they do limit P2P at peak times to make sure streaming services and types of packets (VOIP or games) get delivered at low ping
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/products/pro-Add-On-faq.shtml (there was an statement about it was handled diferant on Fibre that Pro was not needed but is useful for ADSL as its easy to limit an ADSL connection but not so much an FTTC connection)
It is in fact worse than is being reported due to the gigabit broadband provided to selected customers in order to artificially skew the averages. Take them out of the picture and our real average would be pitifully low. I'd be more interested in seeing the median and standard deviation figures, they would show a more accurate measure of out 3rd world public communications infrastructure
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