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Broadband Boosting discussion
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Broadband Boosting
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Not sure if I'm allowed to recommend other sites but I've found speedtest.net good in the past. It lets you to choose your download server so you can test the speed and delay to other parts of the world (invaluable to me because I do a lot of remote working with people in other countries). The link between you and your ISP is supposed to be the main bottleneck (and it usually is) but it's amazing how slow things can get when you are communicating with people or servers in other countries, especially some of the less developed ones.
I tested the work connection this lunchtime and it recorded 2Mb - Its nearer 7Mb on other sites including the one mentioned above which I have used before.
I would like to be able to test from home to my ISP, as well as from home through the ISP to a remote test, to investigate all the paths.
Some ISPs have in-house speed tests so check the website of yours. Tiscali used to have one which was notoriously inaccurate - anybody with more than the 100kbps routinely available to Tiscali customers at peak times would see massive speeds reported which exceeded their sync
As I recall MSE used to recommend Tiscali - this just goes to show that treating broadband as a commodity like electricity and recommending the cheapest offering is a very big mistake. The best advice I can offer for ensuring people get the best from their line itself and pick the best ISP for their needs is to do their research on a site dedicated to broadband matters (eg ThinkBroadBand) and not one dedicated to money saving with a few tech boards added.
It is always worth doing a number of tests with the same site over a period of time and at different times of the day. Then you may well have some ammunition to confront them with