Whats you broadband speed?

Have a quick look at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7202396.stm

Apparently some new company is to create a new Fibre town. I've got an basic 4Meg connection from Virgin Media at home. I know they offer up to 20 Meg and you do get your 20 Meg with is being cable. I am dismayed at the speed in general though with it being cable. I remember when NTL (now Virgin) laid their network (primarily for TV) saying that their firbre optic network would last for years compared with the bog standard telephone lines.

Surely Virgin/Cable has the capacity to give us far greater speed than they are offering at the moment, and they are ripping us off. I know in places like France, they are years ahead with broadband speed. Whats it like in the States or other parts of the world?

I have a 8 Mbit down 1 Mbit up ADSL line here in Holland (35 euros/month).

Cable and telefone have linesharing issues, so they will not utilize max bandwith. They are not ripping you off

When noise reduction techniques improve, so will your bandwith.

I have a 20mb line according to Virgin Media, but I only get between 3800kbs - 4200kbs download and 400kbs-500kbs upload. Which would be equivalent to a 4mb line

I've got 20mbps up and down here in Japan. Cheap too.

Maddus Mattus wrote:

I have a 8 Mbit down 1 Mbit up ADSL line here in Holland (35 euros/month).

Cable and telefone have linesharing issues, so they will not utilize max bandwith. They are not ripping you off

When noise reduction techniques improve, so will your bandwith.

So why are people not told about noise reduction? I mean, if you're getting 1/4 of what is advertised, thats ridiculous. I feel like Michael Douglas in the film 'Falling Down' getting a raw deal on his burger.

Why is there so much noise within a fibre optic cable, surely, technologically, it should be superior? As it is, assuming you live close to a telephone exchange you can get an 8 meg connection down a phone line. Virgins fibre optic network can only give 20 meg (twice and a quarter) and leeappledale only gets a 1/4, we are being ripped off!

1.5 Mbps on a cheap DSL line here.  I've been putting off getting higher speed broadband over cable for some odd reason.

At home, 2mbps/256kbps with Demon since I'm still on ye olde ADSL lines.

I'm still waiting for LLU to come to my area so I can switch to an LLU provider like Be. But still looks like it'll be a while away.

BTW, I can't tell if either my LAN's router is terrible for BitTorrent or if it's at Demon's end. So I use colocated servers to grab torrents and then download them via HTTP.

Be aren't a LLU provider... I know this because they can't take my bulldog line, and require it to be a BT line. (Also, LLU is all well and good, but a complete pain to switch away from, as I'm discovering.)

I'm on an 8Mb bulldog line, 512k upstream. Speed testing websites report that I'm on the third fastest provider in the area aside from Be, and the University of Bristol. But bulldog's service sucks giant brass monkey balls, so I wouldn't recommend them even if they paid me. (Which they used to.)

[colour me confused about LLU and broadband, I thought LLU meant that your phone line got transferred to the broadband provider. I have no idea now what's going on, and I've just had to ask.]

vesuvius wrote:


So why are people not told about noise reduction? I mean, if you're getting 1/4 of what is advertised, thats ridiculous. I feel like Michael Douglas in the film 'Falling Down' getting a raw deal on his burger.

People are told about noise, if your distance to central is long the noise is high and the speed is lower.

vesuvius wrote:


Why is there so much noise within a fibre optic cable, surely, technologically, it should be superior? As it is, assuming you live close to a telephone exchange you can get an 8 meg connection down a phone line. Virgins fibre optic network can only give 20 meg (twice and a quarter) and leeappledale only gets a 1/4, we are being ripped off!

There is no noise in fiber optic cable, that's why it is superior. If you are not getting 20Mbit/s trough your opic line, somewhere there is a choke in the bandwith. Either with your own network, or the provider's, or the provider's uplink or the server you are downloading from.

We can get 20Mb/s through our phoneline, but I dont have the money to spend so I cant tell you any figures out of experience.

P.S. I get the feeling you interpreted my cable as fiber optic, but by cable I mean the coax thing

I use my local cable company for broadband.
I'm supposed to have 15 / 3 Mbps, in New England, USA.

I have never actually got to 3 Mbps upstream though.

This is my typical speed @ home.

2mbit now on UPC cable, moved down from 10mbit as i wasnt using it that much for downloads

im more interested in upload speed and low latency for managing remote servers

50Mbit up and down.

It goes up to 3/4 mbit at times, but BT's cruddy cables also mean the line drops quite regularly.

256kbps still

India sucks in internet speeds
All of you guys are lucky

I'd rather have a solid 256k connection then my current one.

Sometimes it's ok, but other times it drops every 20 seconds (litteraly).

...what im paying $100 a month for:

Rogers Yahoo!
Hi-Speed Internet Extreme Plus

• Modem set-up of up to 18.0 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload.
• Use Extreme Plus for downloading large files, music, video streaming and playing games.
• A 90 GB** monthly capacity applies to Extreme Plus.