Broadband speed

[staffordjas]

In the risk of sounding a real Thicko here.................

Doing a test on my Broadband speed,the results brought up:

Download speed 9346.5 Kbps (9.13Mbps)
Upload speed 477.34 Kbps (0.47 Mbps)



From this ,can anyone tell me what actual MB speed I'm getting please .

 

[wmrcomputers]

10 meg love

 

[staffordjas]

Cheers Mate

 

[harri2000]

With this being in the news today, I'm very happy with the decision to get Broadband providers to advertise their true speeds.

I was very tempted last summer after Sky Broadband advertised up to 20Meg connections... Turned out that the average I would have been able to achieve was 3.4 Mb!!!!

 

[shoes]

I'f your in a cable area and you don't have cable, then you get what you deserve - sub standard internet.

If you're not in a cable area and are forced to use a phone line then it's going to be the case of lesser of evils - avoid sky like the plague. Despite it's reputation, my parents use BT and I must admit it seems very quick, although I haven't any actual figures to give you.

 

[shoes]

10 meg love

Indeed - which gives a theoretical maximum download speed of 1.28 MB/s or 1280 kb/s.

With 9.13 Mbps you're looking at 1141 kb/s.

Providers like to confuse matters by giving you nice large figures, it would seem.

Data is usually referred to as units of bytes, kilobytes (1024 bytes), megabytes (1024 kilobytes), gigabytes (1024 megabytes) and so on. Bytes, however, are made up of bits. There are eight bits in a byte. Therefore 1 byte = 8 bits, 1 kilobyte = 8192 bits, 1 megabyte = 8,388,608 bits.

This is where megabits comes into play. When you subscribe to a 10 meg service you are subscribing to a service theoretically capable of transferring 10,240,000 'bits' of information into your computer every second. 10,240,000 'bits' divided by 8 is therefore a maximum of 1,280,000 bytes or 1,280 kilobytes per second.

When providers say 'upto 8MBps' what they mean is the technology is there, providing you're the only user of the network, and are sat within a few feet of the server which you are connected to. In reality, physics comes into play.

I hope this is of some help

In short though, to work out your download speed from the information you provided, simply divide by 8; 9.13 Mbps / 8 = 1.14 Megabytes per second.

And from that I'm guessing you're on virgin 10MB

 

[staffordjas]

I hope this is of some help


And from that I'm guessing you're on virgin 10MB

Thanks Shoes.

Yup - on Virgin 10MB . ( Was originally on the 20MB package and going very slow,but since WMR has done his magic work on my computer it is running brilliantly on the 10MB ! )

Was never any good at Physics at school as the teacher was so boring . The only physics lesson I remember ,and has stuck vividly in my head all these years, is the one where one of the lads went to sleep in the class and the teacher didn't even notice

 

[John Marwood]

oh the joy of England in the summertime..

Can you meet me in the country
In the summertime in England
Will you meet me?
Will you meet me in the country
In the summertime in England
Will you meet me?
We'll go riding up to Kendal in the country
In the summertime in England.
Did you ever hear about
Did you ever hear about
Did you ever hear about
Wordsworth and Coleridge, baby?
Did you ever hear about Wordsworth and Coleridge?
They were smokin' up in Kendal
By the lakeside
Can you meet me in the country in the long grass
In the summertime in England
Will you meet me
With your red robe dangling all around your body
With your red robe dangling all around your body
Will you meet me
Did you ever hear about . . .


Copper wires

and old exchanges

and fading years...

 

[Ecker]

There used to be an industry standard which used MB (the B in uppercase) to indicate MegaBytes and Mb (the b in lowercase) to indicate Megabits.

It is perhaps not surprising that service providers prefer to use a larger figure, relying
on the innocence of the inexperienced broadband user by using the term: "Meg" to
imply a download speed in MegaBytes (MB).

If you are relatively new to broadband, this information may be useful; look out for the difference between MB and Mb in the trumpet blowing advertising material.

What does intrigue me, however, is: if your machine can receive data at a high speed (downloading) why does it have so much trouble transmitting data (uploading), download speeds being considerably higher than upload speeds. If a comms guru could explain that, I would be very grateful

 

[stoofer34]

http://www.speedtest.net/

Stoof

 

[shoes]

Your upload is limited by your internet service provider (ISP), for reasons unknown to me, however I would take a guess at something along the lines of the faster you can upload, the faster you can share files between each other, and the more data they shift the more it costs them in servers, equipment and maintenance. I would bet they're obliged by law to some degree to to help combat piracy.

Saying that it makes no difference, I regularly max out my connection using bit torrent.

 

[joshua]

yesterday http://www.speedtest.net/result/1181722671.png

today http://www.speedtest.net/result/1182943955.png

 

[Ecker]

Your upload is limited by your internet service provider (ISP), for reasons unknown to me, however I would take a guess at something along the lines of the faster you can upload, the faster you can share files between each other, and the more data they shift the more it costs them in servers, equipment and maintenance. I would bet they're obliged by law to some degree to to help combat piracy.

Saying that it makes no difference, I regularly max out my connection using bit torrent.

Many thanks for that Shoes, your theory makes a lot of sense to me.

 

[prydemusic]

gotta say shoe i dont agree with you sky statement. i recently moved to sky on a tasty deal and really have nothing bad to say about them excellent reliablilty and a reliable constant download speed. They told me living in littleworth i could expect to see 10Mb speeds and right enough i get around 7-9Mb's sometimes up to 12-13Mb's which is better than i was getting on my crumby virgin cable connection in beaconside a year ago which would go down for days on end and wildly go from around 17Mb all the way down to 512Kb's daily.

 

[shoes]

Everyone will have different experiences based on location and usage. I've been with virgin for many years, since the ntl days in fact and have no intention of swapping. ADSL is noticeably slower the further from the exchange you are, obviously we all have to obey the laws of physics, so you may well be quite lucky with your location.

I've been lucky enough to have had only a couple of issues with virgin, all sorted within 24 hours at no cost to me, and would recommend them to anyone. At my current location I never dip below 9.3 Mbps which is quite nice (10 MB subscription) although the green box is at the end of my drive (not that it had any influence on the house I moved into...honest )

If you're happy with ADSL then there is no reason to change, I have experienced a lot of issues with client's connections though and find they can be a bit of a ball ache to resolve sometimes.

Swings and roundabouts perhaps? There's a play park next to my house too if you're game for a laugh

 

[tek-monkey]

I have a 50Mb connection and it happily downloads at 6.1MB almost every time. There is a 100Mb coming soon though.....

 

[Dawz]

I have a 50Mb connection and it happily downloads at 6.1MB almost every time. There is a 100Mb coming soon though.....

I had a nightmare with my 50meg, being slower then my 20meg line.

Ended up being something to do with the wiring but I still only get around 5 meg. Where you based? I'm at the top end of the sandon road.

 

[tek-monkey]

I'm in Holmcroft, they spent about 20 mins playing with settings til I got a decent speed when they installed it. We had a few bad spells, but for the last few months its been pretty much full speed all the time.

 

[prydemusic]

im one of the lucky ADSL users who is only 866 meters from my exchange which is the main reason i get 10-12Mbs. I do seem to remeber not being too far away from the exchange and cable box when i was living in beaconside last year though. I had to call out Virgin 3 or 4 times in the space of that year to get them to fix hickups in the cable box and the modem and about 30 phone calls to tell them to get their bums into gear. The customer service though at virgin i have to say is next to none and i have had plenty of experience of it so i know lol. Actually being able to speak to people who can speak english is a huge bonus when you are talking cable jargon with them.

 

[shoes]

Actually being able to speak to people who can speak english is a huge bonus when you are talking cable jargon with them.

Everyone I have dealt with appears to be Scot......

fair point.