broadband problem

[Eurox]

i know people must hear this question alot, but it is something that bugs me and otherwise i wouldnt complain about but it really has got too far. We had broadband from orange put into our house in august-ish and even though theres 5 of us sharing the bandwith of the 8meg broadband, its download speed is an average of 300kbps. now whats that about? its not because one of us is taking all the bandwith up, cos noone can actually do anything productive unless its 4am. i tested it at one point and it was an average of between 50 and 100 kbps when it should be around 6mbps for our area. now is it our phoneline or orange to blame. is there anything anyone knows out there so help us out? cheers!

[Lil O'lady]

I think the main problem is that while these companies can theoretically offer a wide bandwidth, in reality the spped you experience is determined by how many users the company has sharing your bit of cable, and whether the cable is old-fashioned telephone or new fibroptic.
Here's a bit of a rant:
http://webconverger.org/blog/entry/UK_fibre_op tic/

[ChuckFickens]

it's probably your phone line to blame,

when you signed up you went for a 8Mbs package, if you read the small print carefully it would have been sold as up to 8Mbs. I take it that you have checked online by putting your number in and it then told you should get about 6Mbs for your area, well those online checkers are never correct!

If you then say your average download speed is about 300kbs then you are actually getting about a 3Mbs connection (Mbs isn't megabytes a second, it is megabits a second)

you can check your connection speed here

http://www.speedtest.net/

If you are getting 3Mbs (which = about 300Kbs download) then unfortunately nobody will listen to you if you try and complain as you are getting broadband, the fact that it is advertised as up to 8Mbs and you are only getting 3Mbs does seem a little unfair but that's how it works.

their are a few things you can try to increase the speed, make sure your router is plugged into the master socket for the phone line, buy better ADSL filters as the free ones are normally pretty crap, and also buy a better router (depending on what you already have). getting a netgear router increased my connection by about 1.5Mbs.

[sarah_louise]

How is your upload speed ?
A lot of poor performance is blamed on download when it is the upload that is also lacking you need to turn pages. put in passwords, search terms.
Run Speedtest as advised and have a look at that.

[Eurox]

i have indeed been on speedtest, i go on it every day. it gives me my speed of about 500k today, which i beleive is half a Mb. and i know about the fact you never get what is advertised, but i think 300k during the day is still ridiculous, no?

[ChuckFickens]

no not quite..

Your broadband connection speed is measured in mega bits a second not mega bytes

a single megabit is 1024 times smaller than 1 megabyte.

so although your measuring your speed on speedtest.net at 500Kb a second, which is indeed 1/2 a megabyte a second when it comes to broadband speeds as it is mesured in bits and not bytes 500Kb a second actually equals a 5megabit connection.

As your connection is upto 8megabit then getting 5megabit isn't actually that bad.

[Eurox]

right ok everyones getting confused! what i was meant to say is that my internet is running at about twice the speed of dialup, whether that 0.1M or 100mbps or whatever... its just so slow. on speedtest it comes to about the first few bars of the dial... not half way across it at 3... does anyone understand now?

[ChuckFickens]

what are the actual numbers you get when you run the test?

For a 8meg connection running at full speed you should get 8000kbs on that site, anything from 3000 up would be fine in my opinion, which would equate to a download speed of 300k a second

however as long as you are getting over 256 then you will have problems complaining as that is the speed that is classed as broadband and BT won't upgrade your line if you are getting speeds above that.