Are Broadband speed estimates going down?

MataNui

Looking to move from BT so i have been checking out the alternatives. we cant get fiber and are a reasonable distance from the exchange so i have been paying attention to the estimated speeds these providers are offering.

At the moment i regularly get about 3.6 download but it has peaked with optimised downloaders at 4.2 so its not great but its OK. I can stream from netflix, nowtv or catchup without any buffering at standard quality and do some light browsing at the same time.

Thing is the estimates i am getting are really poor. Like between 1 and 3 meg (range, so the ones that also give a single value are giving 2.5) which is slower than i get now. Doesn't really encourage me to bother changing. So are providers lowering the estimates now they can get held to what they say?

Roland_Sausage

MataNui wrote: »

Looking to move from BT so i have been checking out the alternatives. we cant get fiber and are a reasonable distance from the exchange so i have been paying attention to the estimated speeds these providers are offering.

At the moment i regularly get about 3.6 download but it has peaked with optimised downloaders at 4.2 so its not great but its OK. I can stream from netflix, nowtv or catchup without any buffering at standard quality and do some light browsing at the same time.

Thing is the estimates i am getting are really poor. Like between 1 and 3 meg (range, so the ones that also give a single value are giving 2.5) which is slower than i get now. Doesn't really encourage me to bother changing. So are providers lowering the estimates now they can get held to what they say?

Pretty much this, yes. They tend to be conservative in their estimates for this reason.

In reality the speed you get now should be around the same with any provider.