Your broadband speed - post here

[1stRaven]

Heres mine, uploads a little low, usually higher. VM 50mb.

60MB. nice!

[Jay]

all bow down to my mighty Peruvian net connection

[watercooled]

:O
Have you considered an ISP in England? I hear line length can effect the speed you get.
Just kidding.

[colin_e]

Here we are in 2010 and we're still stuck on the same Internet speeds I was getting in 2003. Pretty annoying when you consider we're not somewhere out in the sticks, but in the middle of the Thames Valley only 1/2 mile from the M4. My ISP is not great, but the limit is (as usual) BT's ropey old copper cable.

We're over 4Km from the exchange, I am on 512/256kb , (yes children, that's KILO bits, ask your parents about those...) on ADSL1, running at or below the official signal/noise ratio limit for ADSL to work, so it's not clear whether ADSL Max or ADSL2 or whatever will help this, or actually run slower than what we have today!

It looks as if the WiMax rollout in the UK has stalled, and BT is putting it's fibre into city centres just the same as Virgin and the other operators, so it's beginning to look like we could be stuck with "barely better than dialup" speeds for years

I seems I can't post images or links on the forums at this point, so here is the link if you are curious-

http: //www (dot) speedtest (dot) net/result/967392850.png

Regards: colin_e

[sammorris]

Those who currently get 512kbps or less, I don't forsee getting any better until at least 2016-2018. There's a reason such areas get bad internet at the moment (even though it's completely ridiculous, as you say, hardly out in the sticks) and that same reason will prevent fibre from reaching you until there's 100% national coverage, which could even be more than a decade from now.
Your best hope is that you're on a major exchange. Which one is it?

[colin_e]

Those who currently get 512kbps or less, I don't forsee getting any better until at least 2016-2018. There's a reason such areas get bad internet at the moment (even though it's completely ridiculous, as you say, hardly out in the sticks) and that same reason will prevent fibre from reaching you until there's 100% national coverage, which could even be more than a decade from now.
Your best hope is that you're on a major exchange. Which one is it?

We are in a place called Hurst, our exchange is Twyford, which I doubt counts as "major"...

Unfortunately, although we are in the middle of the West London corridor around the M4, we are pretty much equidistant from Reading and Bracknell (W/E) and the two major roads (A4, A329) so we are in the centre of a "dark box" as far as telecoms goes.

Rumour has it that there may be Virgin cable running along the A329 South of us, but there is a motorway flyover between us and it, and I don't think any services cross the flyover.

Having said that, there is a mobile mast nearby, and there has to be some connectivity for that, I just wish we could get at some of it.

[sammorris]

Twyford is Fibre to the Cabinet Phase 5. You should be able to receive fibre-based VDSL by summer 2011 at the latest.

[colin_e]

A couple of years ago I remember reading that in the US some communities had got together and effectively created their own local ISP to get Internet connectivity into an area where the national players weren't interested.

Doing something like that here would be cool, but I imagine the layers of planning and other bureaucracy in the UK would make it almost impossible.

[sammorris]

Been done - Rutland Telecom.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8618507.stm

[colin_e]

Twyford is Fibre to the Cabinet Phase 5. You should be able to receive fibre-based VDSL by summer 2011 at the latest.

Well that would be great if it's true. I'm not very familiar with the details of the FTC rollout. If the "Cabinet" ends up being miles away (even back at the exchange) are we actually going to be any better off?

[sammorris]

VDSL is a better system, and the cabinet will be nowhere near as far as the exchange. As far as I'm aware, if the cabinet is actually fitted, BT will guarantee speeds of 20Mbps to pretty much anyone.

[McWilloughby]

I'll just leave this here...

[sammorris]

University connections, very good. I'll go into a campus PC room and do the same on Monday if we're being perverse. Maybe I'll ask someone in CompSci to hook up to the Gigabit port and bust that score up

[redddraggon]

I'll just leave this here...

Where do you get that?

In my office (in the School of Materials) I only ever hit 90Mbps.

[colin_e]

VDSL is a better system, and the cabinet will be nowhere near as far as the exchange. As far as I'm aware, if the cabinet is actually fitted, BT will guarantee speeds of 20Mbps to pretty much anyone.

Well here's hoping. I've got 5 PCs and a Linux box sharing one 0.5mbit connection and it's driving us all nuts.

I was sufficiently desperate, I was seriously considering whether it was cost effective to get TWO lousy 0.5mbit lines and a dual-WAN router and load share between the lines. I know that wouldn't help my peak throughput (that requires bonding at the exchange, seriously expensive from what i've seen) but at least when one of the kids starts watching Youtube everything wouldn't grind to a halt.

Having said that, presumably BT will still be using their extreme 50:1 contention ratios over the new technology, so that "20Mbps" will be something closer to 1Mbps at 6pm on a friday (when my current connection gets so slow I often have to just turn off the PC and do something else).

Regards: colin_e

[colin_e]

I'll just leave this here...

That's just rubbing it in... 8-}