When we bought an iPad a year or more ago PC World threw in their Cloud backup and share product. I’ve just activated it as I’m about to have a clear out of computing products and find that it’s going to take about three days to back up my laptop with the upload rate at around 70KB/sec! That’s hardwired to the router not over WiFi – BT Broadband – is this normal, are there any ways of speeding it up?

It’ll be slow if you have a lot to back up. Is that an issue? You don’t need to do anything. If you need the computer it should so it in the background or just let it run over night for a few nights.

Make sure the iPad is higher up than the router so that the zeroes can roll down hill easier.

Sorry.
What bandwidth do you get from BT? Do a speedtest.

Your BT Broadband is most likely using ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) technology.

The key part of that is asymmetric, in the context of home broadband it means that the downstream is typically a much higher line rate than the upstream as most home Internet usage is downloading data. It wasn’t designed for much upload so doesn’t work well in the new ‘cloud’ era. WiFi isn’t the bottleneck.

70KB/s is ~0.5Mb/s so sounds about right for ADSL.

If you want faster you’ll have to go for BT Infinity or similar…

Thanks for the replies. I can happily let the laptop tick away overnight – currently showing 3 days 10 hours to complete the upload! I daren’t even begin to imagine how long it is going to take to upload from the office PC – a data cull may be in order first.