Blueyonder: lying about their web speeds?

[Macca 10]

adslguide (.org I think!)

 

make sure no other internet progs are running then click on the speed tester link on the left

 

you will need to make sure Java is installed

 

Cheers!

 

Will check it out tonight

 

[GabbleRatcht 10]

you will have 50 to 1 thingy/////so it depends how many is on

 

The "thingy" you refer to is called a 'contention rate' and is effectively how many people are sharing your connection. If you are the only one of the fifty online, it will be fast, but if all fifty are online it will slow down.

 

The more money you pay, the less people 'share' your connection and hence it is faster.

[s10sys 10]

The term is actually "Contention Ratio", as in how many people you are contending with for the available bandwidth for the port you connect to at your local exchange.

 

I don't know about cable but would imagine it is similar to ADSL technologies but basically you connect to your local exchange which houses X number of ports, depending on how a port is configured 10 users, 20 users or 50 users can connect to the one port and share its available bandwidth. The more users who connected to the port the more likely it is to be busy and not have enough bandwidth to serve all of the connections at the speed you expect.

 

In theory during the day less users will be connected to your port allowing a full speed connection, unless you live in a business district or near to a high useage institution like the two secondary schools down the road from me.

 

Your ISP (internet service provider) should tell you what your contention ratio is, 50:1 is very poor, 20:1 is acceptable, 10:1 is good.

 

The less you pay the more your contention ratio will be, thats how ISP's provide cheaper internet access. Some users are happy to pay the minimun per month for ADSL and accept the service they receive, I personally stick with BT, its not the cheapest but it always works at good speed, I've got an 8mb connection and I can d/l at over 600Kbps during quiet periods.

 

I've lost count of the times I've heard "It's a fault with BT" coming out of the non-BT ISP call centre's. If you're with BT they can't pass the buck.

 

Plus.Net is a good alternative to BT, based in Sheffield and recently offered £67million by BT. I will probably change once the takeover is complete.

[Funky_Gibbon 42]

What even though its cable?

 

The further you are away from the exchange the more errors appear in the data you send and receive, meaning it has to request that the data packet is sent again.