Question on my broadband speed. Help!

leelemon

Hi all, i have decided to change my broadband provider to obtain a better speed, because at the moment its pretty pityfull...

one question, some internet magic caculator says that my estimated maximum broadband speed is 5 Mbps. That would be awesome. But what package should i go for? I can get either 8Mbps or 20Mbps. But does getting the 20Mbps mean i am more likely to achieve the maximum speed or would that make a difference compared to the 8 Mbps?

I hope you understand my question.

thanks much

spike7451

The speed you can get is dependent on 2 key things;
1-The length of the line from the BT PSTN exchange to your master ssocket.
2-The age & condition of the line.

The are other factors as well but the two above are key.If your line can only handle 4Mbps,nothing on this earth can change that.
You may be able to get an extra Mb or so dependent on what your exchange is equiped with.
This will tell you what speed you can get:
http://www.btwholesale.com/pages/static/Community/Broadband_Community/Coverage/ADSL_Availibility_Checker.html#

kwikbreaks

The above is correct in so far as it goes but there are a couple of additional points...

Your line determines the maximum speed at which your line can sync. Poor internal wiring can reduce that though. Worth a check - http://www.dslzoneuk.net/socket.php?type=html

The speed you can download at will always be less than your sync speed (~84% being the maximum) due to overheads. If your ISP fails to provide sufficient capacity the speed will be slower still than that at peak times due to contention. Some ISPs deliberately reduce the speed - especially for downloads via P2P or newsgroups.

upto 8Mbps packages are ADSL. The newer upto 24Mbps (sometimes sold slower than that) are ADSL2+. If your line could manage 5Mbps on ADSL it would sync a little faster of ADSL2+ exactly how much faster is difficult to say exactly but I'd guess at somewhere around 8Mbps

Money_Grabber13579

Not all 8 Mbps are ADSL. My package with Talktalk is ADSL2+, but they put a cap on the speed to restrict it. Not that I get anywhere near that anyway!

I hear though that this cap is going to be removed for all customers soon though on Talktalk.

kwikbreaks

I guess there will be excepions like yours where ADSL2+ is capped at some arbitrary low speed but the point is that ADSL supports upto 8Mbps and ADSL2+ supports upto 24Mbps. Just using ADSL2+ won't magically make a long line run over 8Mbps though - below about 3-4Mbps there is no advantage.

Some ADSL services are capped at 2Mbps 1Mbps or 512Kbps and there was one special 256Kbps product for extremely long lines.

jb66

leelemon wrote: »

Hi all, i have decided to change my broadband provider to obtain a better speed, because at the moment its pretty pityfull...

one question, some internet magic caculator says that my estimated maximum broadband speed is 5 Mbps. That would be awesome. But what package should i go for? I can get either 8Mbps or 20Mbps. But does getting the 20Mbps mean i am more likely to achieve the maximum speed or would that make a difference compared to the 8 Mbps?

I hope you understand my question.

thanks much

Get the 8mbps as your line can only handle 5mbps, adsl2 should only come into question on short lines, at this speed estimate it doesnt matter what platform the OP is on

kwikbreaks

That's correct - I'd forgotten just how near to the exchange you need to be to get any advantage from ADSL2+

Money_Grabber13579

kwikbreaks wrote: »

I guess there will be excepions like yours where ADSL2+ is capped at some arbitrary low speed but the point is that ADSL supports upto 8Mbps and ADSL2+ supports upto 24Mbps. Just using ADSL2+ won't magically make a long line run over 8Mbps though - below about 3-4Mbps there is no advantage.

Some ADSL services are capped at 2Mbps 1Mbps or 512Kbps and there was one special 256Kbps product for extremely long lines.

But you can still be on ADSL2+, and have a limit of 8Mbps which is inforced by the ISP. If I lived beside the exchange, I'd still only get 8Mbps because that's all I pay for. I'm still on ADSL2+ though.

But I guess all this isn't really relevant to the OP's question!;)

basill

This speedtest site has a map and gives an idea of what speeds your neighbors are getting on the various provides.

B

jb66

basill wrote: »

This speedtest site has a map and gives an idea of what speeds your neighbors are getting on the various provides.

B

says i got 6mbps but speedtest.net says 18mbps

leelemon

thanks for the answers everyone. it seems i live close enough to the exchange to get a benefit out of adsl2+ except for the small problem it seems it doesnt supply adsl2+ anyway!

so everyone is saying there is absolutely no benefit in getting a 20mbps speed?

im being really stupid. thanks a lot anyway!