…. but don’t want to shoot myself in the foot.

About three years ago, I took out an Orange contract with a phone which came with 12 months free home internet broadband. After six months they started sending me bills for the broadband connection.

Needless to say, I kicked up a stink and they reinstated the free service. It’s been free ever since and they’ve never been in touch to bill me….

I now have no idea if my connection is fast / slow / good / bad but I’m guessing it’s not great. Is there a reliable way to find out if it could be better, either from Orange or another supplier? Don’t mind paying, given it’s been free for the last three years *insert slightly guilty emoticon here, if it makes you feel better* 🙂

Sorry – wrong forum!

If you want fast go for a lease line.
Or move to South Korea.

Both effective. Neither cheap.

What’s a one of them then? Is there any truth to the ads promising “Our fastest broadband ever!!”

You could look at http://www.zdnet.co.uk/broadband-speedtest/ which should give you an idea of what you’re getting.

I tried, and waited six minutes for a result – I’m guessing that’s not good. I’m also uploading a giant wedding album at the same time and it’s taken two and a half hours so far.

The router overheated within five mins and needed a break in the snow outside. This process repeats itself twice a week – is this normal?

Trouble is, that internet content becomes fatter and fatter, yet out brawdbaynd stays at the same speed, in fact it gets slower as more as more people use it. So we end up with rubbishy service As always.

You shouldn’t be trying to do anything online whilst doing a speedtest, it will skew the results wildly. Plus your upload for the wedding album could only be 25% or so of your download speed.

Your router could be knackered if its overheating, it shouldn’t overheat however hard its working. You could replace this with a generic one from PC World etc. If its wireless, this can cause performance issues itself, try plugging in with an ethernet cable instead, and disabling the wireless temporarily.

Otherwise, if your broadband is slow all the time even during off peak periods, its due to a low quality line or the distance from you to the exchange, and there’s not much you can do about it unless you believe its faulty (crackling on the line etc). If its slow during the evening when its busy, it might be worth doing a Google and seeing how Orange compares to other ISPs, specifically you are looking for the contention ratio. This is how many users share a specific amount of broadwidth as allocated by Orange. If its a high contention ratio (quite likely if its their basic service) your service will get slower as more people go online. Business orientated services usually have the lowest (and best performing) contention ratios.

P.S your wedding album, if you are uploading full size pictures it will take ages, you can resize them to say 800×600 and the file size will reduce to a fraction of the original.

speedtest.net when not uploading / downloading and post the results here

So, the big push now is for fibre broadband. The main rollout is fibre to the cabinet (fibre goes from exchange tot he green cabinet in the street, then normal copper to your house).

BT are selling it as Infinity, and other ISPs will be selling it from the new year.

I have it as part of a trial. When it’s good, we get 35meg throughput.
Sadly, because the infrastructure is all BT/Openreach’s, it hasn’t been without its hiccups…..

Later next year will be fibre to the home (aka fibre to the premises) where there is a fibre installed from your exchange into your house. Then we should be more in line for South Korean speeds (100meg).

agreed, go to http://www.speedtest.net and don’t do anything else on the computer or be using your internet connection from any other computer otherwise you’ll get completely skewed results. post the results up here and someone will advise as to whether it’s any good or not.

We’re getting FTTH in a couple of weeks – only supposed to be getting about 27 meg though.

Oh, in 5 days actually!

Virgin Media’s cable BB is pretty good (for me).
Ours is 20mb. Regularly get download speeds (legal of course) of over 1meg a second these days. They do 50mb but cant say we need it that fast. And its expensive.

Cheers for all the responses.

OK – just been to speedteat and it tells me;

Download 1.97 Mb/s

Upload 0.23 Mb/s

PING 74 ms

Orange Home (which scores a paltry 2.25 out of 5).

Is that bad?

Cheers for all the responses.

OK – just been to speedtest and it tells me;

Download 1.97 Mb/s

Upload 0.23 Mb/s

PING 74 ms

Orange Home (which scores a paltry 2.25 out of 5).

Is that bad?

EDIT – sorry for double post – edited to get rid of ‘speed teat’ in first post 🙂

I just got 4.7 out of 5 at work

So is that really bad then? ^^^

I do a lot of uploading of large files to various printers and album companies. It’s a pain as the connection drops out a lot and the uploads take ages.

The router is wireless and gets very hot if I’m doing a lot of heavy duty internetting. It’s D-Link job from PC World….

its bad if it is affecting you yes… its not then no?! from what youve said so far… I think no.

Seeing as you are not paying for it it not too bad. The upload is a little on the slow side as you have found out.

Could also try the check up speed here to see what Bt thinks your phone line capable off

http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/consumerProducts/displayCategory.do?categoryId=CON-TOTAL-BB-R1

i have 50Mb and get between 45 & 50 mb consitantly. a friend has just had his upgraded to 100Mb, as there is such slow contention on that, he get’s just over the magic 100

What I’d quite like to see is a system where you get charged according to the actual speeds you get, not at a flat rate as now. I live in a ‘Broadbaynd Poverty’ area, where speeds at peak times are often as low as 0.2 Mbps. Never had owt above about 3 Meg. This is because BT’s ‘contention ratio’ is much higher than most other areas, because they cram everything into one exchange, which deals with the whole of Canary Wharf too.

If the telecommunications infrastructure was state owned, the Treasury would benefit from renting out stuff to all the ISPs, and make a bloody fortune.

Hey ho. I don’t spose Thatchler thought about that when she sold it all off…