Question about BT Wholesale Speed test

rubble2

Bit of an odd one I think.

I have been on Infinity Unlimited for over a year and have always had download speeds of around 60, upload of around 17 and ping of less than 20.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my PC from XP to Windows 7, everything went well except for a couple of issues (I will start another thread dealing with the second issue to avoid confusion), any way after upgrading I ran a speed check using the BT Wholesale speed test and was surprised to see a D/L of 11 U/L of 7 and ping of 47. I hadn't run a speed check for a while so I didn't particularly associate the change with the switch to Win 7.

It was such a big drop in speed that I rang BT to see if there was a problem with the service, they got me to run the speed test again and upload it to their servers - they agreed that the speed was an issue. They ran some tests and could find nothing wrong with the line etc. so the lady I was speaking to said she had one more test to try and as soon as she started it she said that it had identified a problem 'With the network at the exchange'. She said that she would report it to BT Wholesale who would have 48 hours to report back with a progress report.

The phone call to BT took place last friday lunchtime, on Saturday morning we got a call from BT saying that they needed to make a visit to my house to investigate the problem, they offered to attend the following day -Sunday morning.
The engineer arrived as promised, carried out further tests and could find no real problems, he even replaced the Modem in case there was an issue with that but the speed test was still extremly low. Eventually (as a bit of a last resort I think) he decided to connect his laptop directly to the Home Hub and got a D/L of 65 and an U/L of 17, ping of 19.

At this point he said that the problem must be with my PC and I had to agree, the obvious thing to do seemed to be to replace the Ethernet network card with a more up to date one designed to run with Win7.

I received that today from Amazon, fitted it and --no difference to the reported speed on the BTW speed checker.

Here is the odd thing though - during the engineers visit he said that BT engineers were told not to use the BTW speed checker but to use the Namesco speed check site - so, I have run a speed check on that site and got D/l recorded at 63 and U/L at 15 but ping is still high at 35.

Anyone have any opinion as to why there is such a huge difference between the two tests? and what else would affect the reading other than the quality of the network card?

Thanks

RumRat

Speed tests are not all reliable. I've done a couple in quick succession and got completely different readings on some.
This http://www.speedtest.net/ is one of the most popular. For a more accurate indication of the speed across the whole test, you could try http://testmy.net/

rubble2

RumRat wrote: »

Speed tests are not all reliable. I've done a couple in quick succession and got completely different readings on some.
This http://www.speedtest.net/ is one of the most popular. For a more accurate indication of the speed across the whole test, you could try http://testmy.net/

Just tried speedtest.net and got D/L 61.93, U/L 18.81 and ping of 31.

which looks about what I was expecting, except for the ping reading which is still high

RumRat

Did you try various servers with Speedtest? Unless you are gaming I doubt that your ping of 31 is going to be noticeable.
Try moving your cables further apart. Sounds silly I know, but, it has been known to affect ping. As there are many causes of higher ping rates, it's sometimes a matter of elimination. That said, if the server is a busy one you might not get it any faster.
Good luck.