Marginalia
A miscellany of musings on the tech that crosses my path
Tuesday 23 June 2009, 7:30 AM
ZDNet UK broadband speed test
Not loving so much that my so-called 8Mbps line doesn’t seem to want to get me over 5Mbps. Need to take a fresh look at system tweaks to see if I can make any useful adjustments at my end.
*Erm, other broadband speed tests are available.
PreviousComments on this post
ah... Broadband speed tests - can anyone tell me why test results vary so much? and also - am I right to be super-suspicious of the provider's 'recommended' speed tests?
I have being having recent issues with speeds through my Virgin Media 10MB connection. Basically iPlayer will not work (even at lower bandwidth quality) and the system will not let me download because of speed issues. Even regular page download speeds have slowed.
Virgin directed me to speedtest.net which duly reported 9.4MB download and 0.5MB upload - so no problems according to them. I then tried two alternative speedtests which both reported less than 1MB download speeds - Virgin will not recognise these tests so will not acknowledge any problem on the line....
Their recommendation was to upgrade to 20MB connectivity - great - more money each month...
If you download an audio podcast via firefox (Any browser really) You will get your true download speed for that moment. As you will see the speed will vary according to time of day, internet traffic running through your ISP and the servers that are supplying the content you are downloading.
If you take some screenshots at using a major web browser at varying times of the day and different days of the week, then your ISP will find it very hard to argue their point.
