That was the speed they predicted, and we're getting 72.5 Mbit down from a 71 Mbit estimate - the first time I've bought broadband service and am getting the promised speeds!
When I ordered FTTC the estimate was 8Mbps, with a note that they might not even be able to provide it given that estimate (my ADSL2+ was only managing somewhere around 1Mbps). The Openreach installer dude scarpered sharpish before I could do a speed test, otherwise he would have got one hell of a tip when it actually clocked in at 21Mbps...
I am with BT and they predict in the region 2.5/55 but over the past month I have been keeping records and and it averages 0.287/0.27 yesterday it was 0.03/0.00.
Ah, I see why you are frustrated.
BT know that there is a major capacity problem at the exchange but are not proposing to upgrade it for the foreseeable future but are still pushing the free sports and their film service to people on the exchange, to deliberately sell what you know you cannot supply is fraud.
How are they pushing it? If by mailshot then that's probably centrally administered with no cross-reference to exchange problems (I know, I know...). Even the irritating habit of trying to sell you extra services every time you contact them about
anything is going to be some relatively non-technical bod who doesn't have information specifically about your exchange.
Doubless you've looked into what the problems are but if not it might be worth making sure there isn't a fixable issue. The BT speed guestimator will only give an indication of sync speed - it's probably worth checking that you are getting sync at roughly that rate. If not I would investigate that. Assuming that you are getting decent sync are there any LLU providers at the exchange - since they will have their own backhaul thay might be a better bet if the problem
is contention in the BT backhaul (that said I just
know you're going to say it's a BT 20CN exchange with no LLU).
There's a knowlegable crowd over at
thinkbroadband who might be able to help.
Edit:
and people who live next to the exchange get to watch the films and free sport that BT are now pushing while people like me who are a bit further away (3KM) get zilch and are charged at the same rates for the internet
I've just re-read your post and noticed this comment - really that suggests the problem is with the line rather than the exchange (because if the problem were with the exchange backhaul
everyone would be affected close in and far out alike). Are you able to post line stats? Is FTTC available at the exchange?
Well to be truthful I do not know if any one can watch the films on the exchange I am on, I do know that the broadband issue has been brought up repeatedly by the parish council's for the various villages on the exchange.
I went to BT due to broadband problems that were directly related to the exchange and the reluctance of various other iSP's to call out openreach to the exchange as only openreach personnel can work on the equipment there, I have learned that the equipment is actually owned by Mitsubishi.
The problems according to an openreach tech are due to the age of the equipment and the contention ratio being to high, I did not have any problems until five years ago when a large barn complex was converted to holiday accommodation and all of them put onto the same phone cable as I am on the barns are only about 500 meters from me.
(that said I just know you're going to say it's a BT 20CN exchange with no LLU).
OK having dug out a possible location for where you live I suspect that the above
is true and there is, in fact, no LLU or FTTC availability in your location which sucks big time.
Also the VP status for your exchange is "Amber" so there are certainly problems with exchange capacity.
It is still worth checking that your sync speed. You appear to be just under 4km as the crow flies from your exchange as long as the line doesn't take too many detours 2.5 to 3 Mbps would be reasonable, if it is less it might be possible to achieve some improvement.
Can you post line stats? See
http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php for hints as to how to do this if unsure.
Given the dire speeds you were reporting is 3G an alternative?
The primary driver is entertainment...let's talk numbers. Remember that we are talking about the technology that will be the death of cable TV. The end is near....your TV is merely a monitor in my vision of the future.
In the near future, your TV company will disappear and become just an ISP that provides special boxes that connect to the Internet to grab what you want to watch, when you want it. It's just a computer in a box and your TV is just a monitor. Perhaps you'll opt for bare Internet and get Netflix and stream your local network news from a local site. Either way, your TV source is just another IP address.
In my house, that future arrived years ago but the picture quality leaves something to be desired; clearly, more bandwidth is required to get the picture up to snuff.
The maximum data rate for A/V data on Blu Ray is 48Mbps. Netflix uses considerably less but it looks considerably worse and this fact is widely known among movie buffs. The customer wants his streaming movies and shows in glorious 1920x1080 with 7.1 multichannel audio and he wants it to look as good as his disc based movies in regards to artifacts he can't have that at the moment due to technology constraints.
Fast forward just 2-3 years. Our customer's ISP comes knocking at his door offering to sell him the new "Super Ultra Mega Turbo Bandwidth" package. They offer it, with IP based TV to him for $100USD/mo.
So the customer buys a "Cinematic HD" IPTV package as part of his "super ultra mega turbo bandwidth" Internet. Now we're going to have to deliver it to him; the question is how much are we going to need to deliver? Delivering a higher quality picture takes bandwidth.
Lets allow for a little extra compression over Blu-Ray at the cost of CPU time because his IPTV box will probably be awesome in that regard due to an SoC that packs as much floating point and memory bandwidth as a supercomputer from 15 years ago....20Mbps is my rough figure here. His IPTV box might even be an app for his PC, XBox One or PlayStation 4.
So 20Mbps to give him the best TV experience of his life.....
But wait...he's in America, the land of the TV and there are 4 screens in his home. Each TV has a different person wanting to watch a different show.....now we're up to 80Mbps!
Uh oh! They've got a dual channel TiVo recording other shows too. 120Mbps....not even fast Ethernet is cutting it at this point. (we could possibly record in a non realtime fashion to reduce this)
We have a couple of video game devices....maybe PCs, maybe consoles or perhaps a mix of both. Games have ballooned to 35-60GB in size each and are available primarily from places like Steam. The customer wants these to be delivered in under 1 hour. For a 40GB game, that's a little over 80Mbps.
200Mbps. Granted, that's a pretty high end household but such usage scenario isn't too hard to imagine just a few years out.
Now think about 10+ years out with the push to 4K video or add telecommuting to work with large files, etc and the needs become apparent. There is a market for it.
That was the speed they predicted, and we're getting 72.5 Mbit down from a 71 Mbit estimate - the first time I've bought broadband service and am getting the promised speeds!
I get almost precisely the claimed speed on my Bigpond cable. 100Mb down, and 2.4Mbit up. Presumably because it is software limited somewhere along the line. I'm not magically right next to a node.
Upload is a little slower than predicted, but still 2MB/s upload isn't bad for Youtube etc.
My 2.4Mb at home doesn't help me with youtube. My youtube uploads are limited to around 700-800kbps both at home and at the lab with my 1Mb ADSL2+ connection. Both using Bigpond.
No other site or service is uploaded limited like that. For example, I get the full 2.4Mb upload to my crappy shared server in the US no problem.
Youtube claim they don't limit anything, but something to do with youtube is being limited somewhere. Maybe Telsta/Bigpond.
Youtube claim they don't limit anything, but something to do with youtube is being limited somewhere. Maybe Telsta/Bigpond.
The argument is that ISPs want YouTube/Google to pay for eyeballs, rather than peering unilaterally, so are either imposing artifical restrictions or not building out additional peering capacity to Google to handle the traffic. This makes the experience bad for the user, who blames Google (they think so anyway).
Ars did a good article on this:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/why-youtube-buffers-the-secret-deals-that-make-and-break-online-video/Also keep in mind that your upload traffic likely has to go all the way back to a Google datacentre, which could be a congested link, while much of your playback content can be served from "closer" caches.
I live in the suburbs about 20km out from the Melbourne CBD and get an earth shattering 5.8Mbps on ADSL2+. I have no other choice for internet, my street is only serviced by 3.5Km Telstra copper phone lines. No cable internet, no Optus copper.
The problem i have isn't that 5.8Mbps prevents me from streaming HD video - hell if youtube is behaving i can still stream 1080p without buffering. The problem is that if anyone in my house starts downloading something, the majority of servers are fast enough to saturate my downstream bandwidth rendering the connection almost unusable for anything else until the download finishes.
I'm one of the people who stands to benefit from a 25Mbps national broadband network but that still doesn't make it any less of a retarded proposal.
You guys will be amused at the packages in my hometown in northern Canada.
50/2, 150GB = 111$
16/0.768, 90GB = 80$
5/0.384, 30GB = 63$
1/0.256, 5GB = 42$ <-gotta love this one.
And.. what I get ~1000km south (or 1500km of roadway), at university... 50/10 (70/11 effective, CO [central office] is next door) = 40$, technically 400GB/month allowed, but it isn't enforced.. I regularly push more than 1TB/month
The problem i have isn't that 5.8Mbps prevents me from streaming HD video - hell if youtube is behaving i can still stream 1080p without buffering. The problem is that if anyone in my house starts downloading something, the majority of servers are fast enough to saturate my downstream bandwidth rendering the connection almost unusable for anything else until the download finishes.
That can be solved by a router which supports traffic shaping.
Google published some interesting stats. If people have to wait more than a few seconds for a web page to load or a video to start playing they quite often just close it and look somewhere else. People say it isn't worth it to shave a few seconds off loading a page, but it really is.
Over 15 years ago is was the same but more web designers paid attention to it. Today a lot of webpages are so huge in size they actually could send a large PDF instead :-(
Over 15 years ago is was the same but more web designers paid attention to it. Today a lot of webpages are so huge in size they actually could send a large PDF instead :-(
Tell me about it! Have you ever done a "view source" on the google home page?
Over 15 years ago is was the same but more web designers paid attention to it. Today a lot of webpages are so huge in size they actually could send a large PDF instead :-(
Tell me about it! Have you ever done a "view source" on the google home page?
The HTML with embedded javascript is just a small part of the whole package with pictures, flash, java, ads, css and so on. A good example is
www.telekom.de or the webpages of car manufactures. Another cause for slow webpages is the inclusion of external stuff like ads, trackers and analytic tools, i.e. any delay by one of those external servers slows down the webpage. Some webpages are written so badly that an outage of an external server will block the whole page. This can be simulated easily with one of those privacy browser add-ons.
My provider just doubled the speed from 200/200 Mbit for ~$40 to 400/400 Mbit, no traffic limits . You may think that this is overkill but I must say that using internet somewhere when on trip, now became real PITA for me. I already get used that things just happen instantly. And good upload is must have, starting to understand when you have it. Sending huge HD file to someone is no longer a problem.
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2996705646 thats speed to nearby country, not home network.
Check my bad ass internet, almost 2Mb/s, it is really a good day(nigh in fact, during the day its much slower):
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2996990228Almost 30€ for this crap, and if I consider the phone rental it goes to around 40€..