Should DSL broadband be slower than advertised?

dorks

I am on the Virgin 2mb DSL (i.e. cabled) broadband.

I know that ADSL broadband can be slower than the advertised speed due to "contention ratios", but does the same apply to cabled broadband? I thought cabled broadband was a single cable per user.

I only ask as I have just measured my connection and it just under 1Mb.

normanmark

Well Virgin (Cable) operates a traffic management scheme between peak hours (4pm-Midnight). If you download so much between these hours then they'll reduce your speed (for example 20mb customers get reduced to 5mb) for four hours.

So if you're downloading anything big, keep it till out of peak times

A_Nice_Englishman

(A)DSL is broadband via a telephone line
Cable broadband has a dedicated cable
It's not clear from your post which you have but both can have contention issues and the download speed from a remote site will depend on the speed and congestion on all the links between it and you.

darwin-rover

Could be be your PC settings or your router (if you have one)
Download the TCP optimiser and select "optimal settings" , set to 2000 and apply the changes .
http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php