Slashdot Mirror
The State of UK Broadband — Not So Fast
Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."
Because during my download of Fedora 10, Virgin Media will throttle my connection from 8 to 2 ( mb/s ) and put my ping time ( to Google ) into the 2 second range.
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
Maybe because at the moment there are very few applications of an Internet connection for which you'd notice the difference between 1mbit and 10mbit.
Unless you are a habitual downloader (a group statistically overrepresented here on Slashdot), you won't notice any difference to your web and email by moving above 1mbit. Hell, with the intelligent buffering that most video sites have, it's likely that you wouldn't even notice the difference on those sites unless you're really paying attention.
So cut it with the "we need faster broadband" BS. What we need before a 100mbit pipe is a legislative framework that ensures that consumers can actually use that 100mbit pipe without getting shagged six ways from Sunday by their ISP.
I'm looking at you, Telstra.
I hate printers.
I live on a small Spanish island off the West coast of Africa. I have a 10Mb/s line, and I can hit the full throughput of this on a good torrent... I did so downloading Ubuntu... This was after contacting Telefonica shortly after the line was installed to express concern about the poor throughput and them saying yes the line wasn't set up properly but should work fine within 48 hours which it did.
At a previous apartment I lost my line after somebody basically cut through it while doing DIY somewhere in the block. It was rewired I think 3 days later.
Yes there are many bad storied about Telefonica that could be told, but my point is that I'm quite confident that I have better bandwidth here than I would have if I returned to the UK. One more reason not to go back to the UK I guess.
True - but then us corporate users who transfer sales & backup data between offices overnight *do* notice the problem.
Our new HQ is quite a long way from the exchange so we struggle to get above 4Mbit/sec anyway - but that's a side issue.
We have 30 satellite offices each running 1-8Mbit connections and we can get the data in overnight but if we wanted anything more 'real-time' we'd have to go fibre - and then we're talking something daft like a 10KGBP+ install to 'upgrade' to a whopping 10Mbit connection *PER SITE* - or get the connections cheaper in return for a long-term contract. Then, you'd need to factor in the monthly rental charges.
Overall, ADSL does what we need - slowly - but the price differential to the next possible speed solution is out of all proportion to the benefits.
AT&ROFLMAO
I don't want to sound like a brat, but I actually wanted to test my 1 Gbit home connection to its full extent. I had two identical computers with 1 Gbit cards and wiring, RAID configurations that surpass the 1 Gbit barrier and whatnot.
I was actually very satisfied with the 544 Mbit throughput that I reached, but I wanted to see if I could get more. I phoned the ISP, explained the problem and had it fixed two days later. Now I'm peaking at 978 Mbit. Still, it's interesting that ISP:s of such high speed connections care so much about the extra excessiveness.
Anyway, that was about a year ago and since then I've moved to another country. Nowadays, I have a 30 Mbit over cable, effective bandwidth of some 25 Mbit, but I'm not complaining.
Full Tilt