The State of UK Broadband — Not So Fast 279
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."
Before or after throttling? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Before or after throttling? (Score:5, Funny)
But Virgin offers a new sixteen megabit DSL service! That's sixteen megabits total [today.com], of course.
I'm just picturing Virgin's 'thinking.' "We've heard that you can use things called 'computers' to send messages and even pictures. That'd be a good service to offer! We have this bloke in facilities who knows a bit about computers, we could get him to run it between refilling the coffee machines. If we tried, we could probably make it as reliable as our telly. Nobody really minds when the football drops out ten minutes before the end, do they."
Virgin: "We've Never Done It Before, And We Don't Really Know How To."
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I've been really happy with my Virgin connection. I've never had an unannounced loss of service and my downloading speeds stay pretty constant, though not near the actual speed of the advertised package im on. I get my broadband and tv through a cable point which I think would increase the reliability?
I agree that I would rather have my speed throttled than penalised in some other way. The only bummer is when you hit your limit when there's only a small part of a file left to go and you have to wait another
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I prefer having no limits at all. My current provider has never bothered me about download levels, torrents always seem to saturate the line speed and if you live close enough to the exchange you can get 24Mb/s. Where we live we're only getting 16Mb/s, but at least I can use that fully without any complaints. And at £22/pm they are in the same ballpark as all the throttled / limited services.
I don't normally mention them by name as nothing is worse for an ISPs customer relations than recommendat
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Re:Before or after throttling? (Score:5, Interesting)
But it is all fibre optic! The advert says it is, so it must be quick!
Quite how Virgin can get away with saying their broadband is fibre optic when the last loop is copper is beyond me. It's about time the ASA did what they are supposed to do - BT broadband is fibre optic by their interpretation of things!
Re:Before or after throttling? (Score:5, Interesting)
Beats me, but Comcast is doing that here in the US too in response to Verizon building actual fiber to the home. They have this weird graphic of various colored lines springing up all across the US which I guess "proves" they have "the largest fiber optic network."
It's actually kind of pathetic. Granted I think Comcast's point is supposed to be that they do TV better than Verizon - thereby saving themselves from "truth in advertising" laws. Still, that has nothing to do with using a fiber optic network. And they certainly don't offer comparable Internet speeds.
I find it kind of funny that two companies are pulling the "but we use fiber optics somewhere in our network!" card.
In Comcast's case it may be more pathetic, since the ads are sort of like the Mac vs PC ads: you've got the "fiber optic" guy who's hopped up on "light" (he's glowing and flickering), and then you have the "down-to-earth" Comcast guy. After making fun of the fiber optic guy, Comcast then announces that they, too, use fiber optics. At best, I would think that makes them equal. But what do I know, I'm not the charismatic down-to-earth guy.
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Thanks
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http://mirrors.virginmedia.com/ [virginmedia.com]
Judging by the fact you have an 8mb/s connection, I assume you have ADSL rather than cable. I can happily download at 20mb/s and still have a reasonable ping time (I have some QOS on my router to help aswell).
Regards
elFarto
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Get Be broadband (Score:3, Informative)
24Mbps, static IP address, 19 quid a month.
Sure, due to line quality I only get about 11-14Mbps, but that's ok.
They don't seem to throttle at all, torrenting stuff is nice and fast, as are my frequent OS downloads/net installs. No caps either AFAICT.
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www.google.co.uk goes to these IPs for me, in London: 64.233.169.104 64.233.169.147 64.233.169.99 64.233.169.103 (and lots more, if I repeat the query). YouTube is 208.117.236.76. tracepath suggests they're all in the UK, though I thought Google's datacentre was in Ireland.
I see a similar performance with BT ADSL, I'm considering switching (I've only just moved in to this place, and BT ADSL was already there).
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It seems to be common eh? My mum uses Tesco and their service is shit during peak times too. I work from home, with colleagues in California. I can't use my Vonage Canada VoIP phone and often Skype between 6pm and 10pm when I visit her due to the quality of the internet connection. It's fine during the day, but in the evening the latency shoots way up. Traceroute reveals latency to the broadband access server is fine, but it's after that that it jumps by 500-750ms or more. I guess that means either th
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Hmm, maybe I can't ping the BAS itself. That doesn't seem right. Maybe it's the first hop latency, which puts the problem somewhere either on the BAS or the connection for it to the ISP. Definitely not the link from the home to the BAS as that would vary at such predictable times.
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BT deny any form of throttling, yet if I download at any time of day via FTP I get ~450kB/s, it is morning now and with HTTP I can get 300kB/s, in the evening more like 50-80kB/s. Crazy, seems BT throttle port 80.
Deny?
BT's Fair Usage Policy [bt.com] states:
BT continuously monitors network performance and may restrict the speed available to very heavy users during peak time.
... and they explicitly mention P2P:
we restrict P2P speeds if it's having a negative impact on the online experience of the majority of our customers. We normally place restrictions in the evenings at peak time, but we do apply them during the day if a lot of customers are using P2P at the same time.
we are not stopping you from using any P2P service. P2P will just be slowed down in the evenings and during the day if a lot of customers are using it.
You might not have looked hard enough to find this, but that doesn't make it a denial.
My BT Broadband connection gives me about 6.5MB/s for non-P2P traffic, but that's because I'm only about 1/4 mile from the exchange.
P2P is slower than dial-up in the evenings, but is generally fast enough between midnight and 8am, and even to late morning on Saturday/Sunday, so I just schedule my big BT downloads to run overnight.
Tell it to the people who cannot get broadband (Score:5, Insightful)
Concerned as I am with slow speeds, I'm more concerned that I cannot at home get broadband at all because there's insufficient regulation of the monopoly landline supplier. BT is not interested in fixing the twisted pair arriving at my house such that ADSL will work. The UK government is not interested in extending the Universal Service Obligation - the thing that forces the monopoly to connect you to the phone system for voice calls - to broadband.
HMG's insistence that broadband is of economic and social importance is just so much humbug and cant if they will not bother themselves to lift a regulatory finger to ensure that the whole population can access at least a basic service.
Perish the thought that the vast additional profit arising out of millions of DSL connections should be put towards improving the basic infrastructure.
But I can get 2kbps downstream (yup, that's right) through my 2.5 or 3G connection. Yay. I think I was getting better than that on dialup in about 1995.
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You need to get an iPhone. Apparently they are really fast [guardian.co.uk].
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Argue it with BT.
Write to your MP.
I did this, and BT eventually fixed it (about a year after I first started moaning). Just for our house, mind. The rest of the estate (a new build in 1998) had no broadband, and I'm sure they continue to have no broadband.
Estate was the "Warwick Gates", in Warwick.
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And, for God's sake, don't forget the most important step:
Use lots of acronyms, without first defining them, so as to totally confuse anyone reading your post
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I'd assume that the parent poster knew the acronyms for British Telecom and Member of Parliment..
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Here in Ireland the man has just announced to pick 3's 3G(HSDPA)to meet their requirements for universal broadband by 2009!
http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/1125/broadband.html [www.rte.ie]
WTF! How can you say 3G is broadband! Just check out the problems people in Ireland have been having with 3's service http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055115306 [boards.ie]
I'm lucky to have fixed wireless here in North Cork, but have friends who have no broadband access at all.
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I've had a number of BT engineers visit the house to try to get DSL working. And they've done some work on the line to improve the signal strength. They conclude that it ain't going to happen; anecdotally, because the line is mainly buried, old, and waterlogged.
As they have reached this conclusion, they've marked my phone line on their database as "cannot get broadband" ... and that's it. They'll make no further attempt / take no further interest / decline any further order from me for broadband.
I cannot gi
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Get cable.
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Get cable.
Right. Because cable providers are renowned for their willingness to spend tens of thousands of pounds digging up mile after mile of road in order to lay cables to an area where there might possibly be enough customers that they would earn a couple of thousand per annum in revenue.
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I've had a number of BT engineers visit the house to try to get DSL working. And they've done some work on the line to improve the signal strength. They conclude that it ain't going to happen; anecdotally, because the line is mainly buried, old, and waterlogged.
As they have reached this conclusion, they've marked my phone line on their database as "cannot get broadband" ... and that's it. They'll make no further attempt / take no further interest / decline any further order from me for broadband.
Two suggest
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Rolling out a wireless network (mobile phone, mobile data, etc) is much much cheaper than rolling out a wired network. It saves digging in all those cables to the end users. Apparently the copper running to GP's home is not suitable for ADSL, I don't know the technology so can't comment on this matter. Having to replace such cables is mighty expensive.
That said 2 kbps is of course ridiculously slow for a 3G mobile connection. I would expect to get 50-100 times that; here in Hong Kong 3G is advertised in th
I've tried wrangling with BT over this (Score:5, Informative)
I've got a good modem/router - Alcatel Speedtouch - which lets me run diagnostics on the line. The diagnostics report that my signal to noise ratio is just within the limits to establish an aDSL session (from memory it's 9dB), and certainly nowhere close to being able to run at max speed (which would need a S/N of something like 50+dB).
I've contacted BT about the poor state of my line, and they basically ignore me. Actually, it's worse than that, they lied to me claiming that they have tried to contact me by phone, but I provided only my cell phone number and my e-mail, and there is no record of any missed calls from BT, just an e-mail claiming they tried to call. (not to mention that I always have it switched on and within easy ear-shot during working hours).
I guess they just suck !
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To be fair, DSL companies really have no idea how dirty your line will be until it is fully hooked up. Is it a problem in your house? Last mile copper? Switch box? Nobody really has a way of knowing, and it is bloody expensive to find out.
They're not stiffing people through neglect or malice, but rather because of technological limitations.
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How close are you to the exchange?
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Complain about excessive line noise when you call people It cuts in and out. Oh, and it kicks off your ADSL too regularly. They'll run a remote test and tell you it is not so. You put your foot down and they send down an engineer "but we will charge you if there really is no problem". You accept this.
Cool thing is, the engineers are usually reasonable people and they like fixing your problems and do care about ADSL too - it is truly only the call centre idiots that are trained to screw you.
Do you have above
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9db is a good SNR. SNR does *not* measure capacity only the noise on the line. btw. a good modem can hold a line at 3db or less.. try the netgear dg834gt for example.
A 50db SNR is probably impossible unless you throttled to 512kb and connected yourself by CAT5 directly to the DSLAM.
You need to be looking at Attenuation. From that you can calculate approximate line length (18.2db/km theoretically, although it's a very rough calculation).
Re:I've tried wrangling with BT over this (Score:5, Informative)
The 9 dB figure quoted is the signal to noise margin. With adaptive rate ADSL (maxDSL) the DSLAM and modem negotiate a target noise margin, and sync at whatever speed is necessary to achieve this.
The target noise margin starts off at 6 dB. If this results in an unstable connection then the target gets increased, first to 9 dB, and then to 12 dB, and finally to 15 dB.
So 9 dB is really not that bad. It means that the quality of your line varies a bit, but not too much. The more your line quality varies, the higher the target noise margin that is automatically set.
The point of having a higher target noise margin is that when the line quality deteriorates after the modems have synced and the noise margin drops, it wont drop as far - that is - it starts from a higher value.
As the noise margin drops, first of all error correction kicks in. That can correct a certain amount of data corruption. As the noise margin drops further the error correction becomes inadequate and some packets get dropped because they contain uncorrectable errors.
Once the line starts dropping packets then the data transfer speed plummets because those packets have to be requested again. Soon you reach the point where even a simple text-only web page takes several minutes to load, or just times out.
Eventually as the noise margin approaches zero, the modem loses sync. At this point it will probably resync automatically, but this time at a much lower rate in order to re-establish the original target noise margin. If this happens regularly then BT's systems will automatically increase your target noise margin to try to prevent this happening as often.
The final insult is that when the modem resyncs at a slower speed, BT's systems reset your 'IP Profile' to match your new sync speed. The IP Profile is effectively a cap on the data rate (not the sync speed).
Note that this adjustment to your IP Profile happens immediately when your modem resyncs slower, but not when your modem resyncs faster. In the latter case your line has to remain stable at the higher speed for five days before BT will put your IP Profile back up.
With fixed-rate ADSL it is a little different. There is no target noise margin - the modem just connects at the fixed speed and the noise margin you get is just whatever it happens to be. Fixed rate doesn't do error connection so it generally needs a higher noise margin than adaptive rate to avoid retransmissions. But the good news is that there is no IP profile rate cap, so when a period of poor line performance ends your download speeds will recover immediately.
Now, what was the question?...
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Incidentally the sync losses always started after the street lights turned on, I guess the lines weren't insulated properly. The customer service at
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SNR isn't completely useful by itself. At 6dB you'll probably start having problems. You need more information. What's your theoretical max rate, or the line occupation? Some modems tell you this, some don't. Maybe DMT [mhilfe.de] will work with your modem. It's a fantastic diagnostic tool.
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"I guess they just suck !"
I have a good one for you. In the early hours of October 30th thieves made off with BT multicore cable from their access points in the pavement on my street. Got through to their automated line testing using my mobile, entered the number to be tested (my home landline) waited the short while for the test to complete and it came back saying that there was no fault on my line. I found this all rather amusing as I was standing in the street by the open access point looking at the resu
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Upload on BT is 256kb minimum and some packages go up to 832kb. It's possibly down to the speedtest itself.. the real test is to go to a fast FTP site (mirrorservice.org.uk for example) and download something big.
Is that really so bad? (Score:2)
So maybe a lot of people are using "broadband" as a more convenient replacement for dial-up, or as part of a "triple play" package, but actually don't download much and therefore don't care.
If all you use is e-mails, youtube, facebook, and the occasional iTunes download you have no reason to care about speed.
I mean, 8Mbit/s still means a whole album will download in a couple of minutes, I think it's sufficie
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That's exactly the problem - limiting people to those uses. Today's infrastructure can always accomodate today's applications, by definition. But for sustained economic growth new more efficient and productive technologies must be adopted.
Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
I've contacted [any telco anywhere in the world] about the poor state of my line, and they basically ignore me.
There, fixed that for you.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
The major problem with Telefonica, AFAICT, is that they basically refuse to install DSL facilities anywhere the slightest bit out of the way. I know people who live less than five kilometres from major commercial centres in mainland Spain but have to get their broadband via m
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You're right, once you get "Es no posible" you're pretty much screwed regardless of what the issue is or what you have to say. I remember somebody elses number/line getting switched to mine, and being able to demonstate this to Telefonica and just being told it wasn't possible... I had to move apartment in order to get a working line.
My friend did manage to get Telefonica to run a line halfway up the mountain just to his house after his (Spanish) wife spent some time threatening Telefonica with what I think
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I've contacted CenturyTel twice over the years about problems with my line. Both times I got a prompt, courteous, and helpful response. I alsp had pretty good support from their predecessor, GTE North.
Headline speed isn't that important (Score:3, Informative)
Headline speed isn't everything.
"Unlimited" offers that are actually very limited, FUPs, throttling, packet shaping, off-peak, on-peak, web caching, port blocking, Phorm; - no wonder with all this crap the average customer is confused about their connection.
I will now shamelessly plug http://superawesomebroadband.com/ [superaweso...adband.com] and get me coat.
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"Unlimited connections on static IPs. No download or upload limits. No port blocking, no packet shaping, no transparent web caches, no "fair usage" policy, no logging, no Phorm, no ad-serving, no small print. Rolling 1 month contract. No lock in period. Direct Engineer Support 24 hours a day, every day. Good, not cheap.
£60 /month"
I think this may be the company I have been waiting for my whole [internet] life.
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Living in Hong Kong, my office is connected to the Internet over a 2M/2M ADSL line - 2M both up and down, from Wharf T&T Telecom.
The interesting thing is that in both directions I usually get 3Mbps throughput! That is 50% more than the headline... I have to say I haven't tried pushing up and down to the max at the same time. Would be an interesting experiment.
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at £60($90) a month it ought to be bloody awesome
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I pay about £5/mo over the going rate for Zen.co.uk, because they're still geek-run and Very Good Indeed. They also superlatively BS'ed British Telecom to get my DSL connected faster than usual at my new house, and that's the sort of service I'm willing to pay for!
I have Sky as well - I looked at the "free" Sky broadband, and to get the equivalent of my Zen connection would be £5/mo less. It's entirely worth it for competent service.
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I'm alright, Jack. (Score:2)
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Consistent night and day >6Mb/sec on an advertised 8Mb connection. Bittorrents running at several 100 KiB/sec in the right circumstances. Never been capped, throttled or shaped despite downloading 10's of GiB/month regularly. Who's my ISP ? That evil multinational known as Orange !
So, their service actually, like, works now? 'Cause when I was with them, the service worked for about the first week, but then the router started refusing to connect (it would sync fine, but couldn't establish a ppp link).
OK in my experience (Score:2)
I have broadband connections in two places. With my 10Mbit headline Virgin cable service, I get 9.6Mbit+ which persists long enough for me to download a Linux ISO. With the 8Mbit headline ADSL I can get about 5.5 Mbit for the same purpose. I suspect some upstream blocking, because when this line first came active, I was getting 7.6Mbit, but I haven't seen that for a year or so.
So you can get reasonable connections in some places.
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I live in a rural area, about a mile outside the nearest village/town.
I use Virgin as an ISP over a BT phone line, and my download speeds are noticeably faster than my mother's connection. She uses BT Internet as an ISP, but lives in central Reading, so one would assume should have a faster connection.
Punchline being, if you're using BT, and you're unhappy with the speed, give Virgin a try [virginmedia.com].
and in my Aussie accent, all I can say is... (Score:4, Funny)
bloody pommie whingers
(that's a term of endearment)
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speaking as a UK user (Score:2)
There is considerable obfuscation being performed by UK ISPs on the subject of connection speed.
For example, I have an 8Mb line. I know that this speed isn't theoretical, I can obtain it fairly easily, dependent on the servers I connect to. For instance if the server is on Janet, I'm pretty much assured of 7-8Mb. 5-6Mb is usual, with 2Mb happening some evenings.
However, when talking to several ISPs recently as I was considering changing provider, they all insisted that they had 'tested' my line, and it was
Virgin 20mbit (Score:2)
Some webpages, even the BBC in the early hours, are slow to _display_. The requesting of 50+ images, loading of a flash plugin and rendering by Javascript all add up. It has nothing to do with a slow connection on the client side. From 5pm til 10pm there is a noticable slowdown on all websites - I still g
UK vs. Poland (Score:2)
I spend considerable amounts of time in both countries.
In Poland I pretty much get the advertized speeds, maybe it's slightly slower in peek hours. Currently I'm connected via cable - 6 Mbps and yesterday's episode of House is coming home almost that fast.
I've lived in two different houses in UK over the past 1.5 years and used the web at friend's house numerous times. Every house had DSL connection (speeds between 6 and 10 Mbps) from different providers. It's decent during the day (I'd say ~3 Mbps), but
How ? (Score:5, Funny)
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Because nobody is using them to the max anyway of course :) If the users would actually start using those bandwidths, then, you know, trouble would come over the telcos. They would have to stop overselling their capacity and so.
So no it's good as it is. ISPs happily overselling their services, and in the meantime keeping their excessive users nicely in check to allow the government to monitor everything without being swamped. Now who would want to change that ideal situation.
P.S. just for the mods: the ab
Speed Isn't Everything (Score:2)
Low latency and consistent speed can be just as important (or more important, depending on your use) as maximum speed.
I pay $135/month for a 1.5mbps synchronous connection in the United States. On the face of it that seems ridiculously expensive for what I'm getting. But that includes a /28 block of static IP addresses and the connection is *always* that fast. There are no slow times. There are no problems. (The longest "outage" I've seen in the past 6 months is about 5-10 seconds, and that's been 2 or 3 ti
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I live in Sweden. I have a 100 Mbps connection (that is always 100mbps) I pay roughly 20 US bucks a month for. It is not capped (explicitly or implicitly) it is always connected, it has the same up and down speed. Though I only have one IP.
The funny part is that we too have those crappy deals in Sweden where you pay 40 bucks a month for a 10 Mbps ADSL connection. And people eat the crap those ISPs feed them with a healthy appetite.
It is an oligopoly. DSL ISPs can take ridiculous prices for substandard produ
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>but you probably have SDSL
Correct.
>and you get an SLA. and IP space, with reverse
>DNS control, and proper support. and and and...
>you've got 16 IPs
No SLA, but I get the rest.
>who is your provider?
One Communications.
Well, yeah... (Score:2)
Furthermore, the majority don't care. Ask most of the non-geeks I know what speed their internet connection runs at, and the answer will be "Who knows, I don't care really, as long as I can get the internets on my computer thing I'm happy".
Heck I still know a lot of people who use dial-up, as it achieves their only goal (getting on the internet) for
At least I get more than that (Score:2)
I get 6 mbit/s out of my DSL line. Which is great, until you consider it's a 16 mbit/s line which they reckon can do 8 mbit/s. I don't think I've ever seen 8 mbit/s out of it.
An acquaintance of mine was incredulous, to say the least, on returning to the UK after 15 years in Japan.
Maybe They Don't Care (Score:2)
> 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.
Perhaps this indicates that it just doesn't matter much to them. Hard as it may be for Slashdotters to believe, there are many people who do not regularly download entire operating systems and unauthorized copies of full-length movies.
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Perhaps this indicates that it just doesn't matter much to them. Hard as it may be for Slashdotters to believe, there are many people who do not regularly download entire operating systems and unauthorized copies of full-length movies.
Agreed. And right now, 2mb/s is more than enough for most users. So what's everyone complaining about?
Useful site (Score:2)
http://www.samknows.com/broadband/ [samknows.com] is a good site for checking exchanges.
Sadly for me, Entanet don't have 8 meg available on my exchange but given that they have no throttling and their caps are well documented (30GB peak & 300GB off-peak rather than "unlimited" but with an undefined "fair use policy") I'm not complaining too much.
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If you are just surfing the web 512kbps is plenty. Afaict most website designers still designining thier sites so they are tolerable on dialup. Assuming the limiting factor is bandwidth at the users end (it often isn't unfortunately, often the limiting factor is badly designed and/or overloaded dynamic content) tolerable on dialup means fast on 512k broadband.
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I have a 750k connection* and it works just fine. I don't see any reason to go to a higher speed. *(I could go to 6000k but voluntarily limit myself to 750.)
Re:Fast enough... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Fast enough... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Our HQ location is against us for copper-based solutions and as soon as fibre is mentioned we're in the 10K+ territory.
The annoying things is that we share a split office and 'next door' has fibre carrying 12 channels of ISDN-30 AND it terminates in our area - but BT and the third party service provider point blank refuse to run services to two different companies through it - technically it's a no-brainer, but the mere mention of investigating the possibility has the companies in a total brain-fart.
We coul
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We already use rsync but due to the dynamic nature of some of our large-ish (10GB+ MS-SQL) databases there is still a lot to sync.
Things will improve when we move to a new app that runs of a central, hosted, service but at the mo we have to cope with 25-odd separate databases overnight. Yes, the current app's database architecture/schema/replication is crap but it's also beyond my control.
Re:Fast enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
My bet is that these are closely related. If consumers knew about their comparatively low speed connection (i.e., knew enough to know they should care and how to figure it out) then they'd be pushing for faster speeds. They'd leave providers who are providing "slow broadband" and move to better ones, and the screwups would have to get right or get out of the broadband business.
But your average Peter Pint doesn't know enough to know better. (Hey, I'm not putting down you folks over the pond--the average Joe Sixpack thinks broadband is a woman's belt)
Just my two cents
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In other words, nobody cares.
My bet is that these are closely related. If consumers knew about their comparatively low speed connection (i.e., knew enough to know they should care and how to figure it out) then they'd be pushing for faster speeds. They'd leave providers who are providing "slow broadband" and move to better ones, and the screwups would have to get right or get out of the broadband business.
To what purpose? Are high internet speeds really that good for winning dicksize contests among "normal" people?
But your average Peter Pint doesn't know enough to know better. (Hey, I'm not putting down you folks over the pond--the average Joe Sixpack thinks broadband is a woman's belt)
Just my two cents
Unfortunately, you're probably right. If they did know better they'd go for faster speeds (or not) based on noticing that the slower speeds weren't good enough, rather than marketing hype and your "bigger (faster) is better".
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Well they might move to another provider, but still be in the same sinking boat.
Take my girlfriend's house as an example. They used to have BT DSL which topped out at a whopping 1.5mbps (on good days). They have since moved over to Tiscali for various reasons and see about the same speeds. Tiscali sells their particular package up to 8mbps, but they will likely never see speeds like that.
Apparently the problem is with the exchange, but may also be the last mile of copper, who knows? It's highly unlikely it
Re:Fast enough... (Score:4, Informative)
Or you can find a smaller provider who will sell a "slower" service for less money and possibly provide more ancillary services or better support etc.
Why pay for an up to 8mb service when your line can only handle 1.5Mb? go for a cheaper 2Mb service.
Also, Tiscali and BT consumer are two of the worst ISPs you could have picked, they are both mass market isps catering to the lowest common denominator. These ISPs will try to pack as many customers onto the smallest connection they can, safe in the knowledge that for every customer they lose there's 10 more who aren't clued up enough to notice. Tiscali for instance, may have 50 "up to 8mb" users connected to a single exchange, which has a 2mb backhaul connection...
Have a look at beunlimited (now o2) or some of the smaller but more highly rated isps on adslguide.org.uk, and avoid the big mass market ones like the plague, they are the mcdonalds of the isp world.
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Actually, here in the UK, stuff like BBC iPlayer is getting very popular and seems to have taken off with non-techies and non-pirates.
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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. ...sayeth someone who doesn't live in a shared house, in my opinion.
TBH, with web pages often reaching a megabyte when you factor in the images, I'm happy of any extra speed I can get. Three youtube/iplayer streams is enough to make a 1Mbps connection appear slow. My parents in Wales have a 2Mb line that operates at ~1Mb and when me and my sis are back for win
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Anybody can notice the differnce between 1 mbit and 10 mbit video. Blu-ray is 40 mbps, and that's if only one channel is being watched. Video on the Internet is THE killer app, and it's just beginning.
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The other reason to stay with Zen is that of our work team of six, three of us are on Be, one on Zen (me), one on Virgin and one on Pipex. We need more variety for utter reliability on call ;-)
(Mind you, if I got company broadband it'd probably be BT. Been there, done that, changed IPs every eight hours, used OpenDNS 'cos BT Openwound can't even run a DNS server competently. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO)
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The ONS get sent statistics on what the customer has bought, not the actual line speeds, so no, it's probably not something to worry about, especially since a large proportion of people are probably on the free services they get with their TV or mobile phone contract.
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I'm physically 200 meters from the exchange. Somehow the line is over 2000 meters long...
Because you don't connect directly to the exchange. The architecture is this:
Exchange local hub your house.
Local hubs are generally not located near the exchange, but at some distance from them.
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DSL doesn't share bandwidth. Cable shares bandwidth.
So how come DSL providers advertise contention ratios (typically either 50:1 or 20:1, not the 25:1 the OP was talking about) then?
AIUI, your bandwidth isn't shared as far as the exchange. But from the exchange to your ISP's backbone it is shared.
OTOH, the capacity of the shared link isn't the same as the capacity of your own line. Usually it's substantially larger, and has substantially more than 20 users. This makes the connection rates average out muc