just got virgin broadband installed, I genuinely cannot believe how fast it is! been suffering iPhone4 tethering up until now so the comparison may be a tad stark but w00T!

advertised speed 50mb
actual speed 72.0mbps

whats more I can save the stored programmes from the Vbox (samsung) onto USB!

/end of showing off.

I would very much like to have Virgin fibre broadband. I get a measly 2mbps if I’m lucky.

🙁

ok I am a computer numpty 😳 how do you check your speed?

Mate of mine lives in Sweden, he’s got Gigabit Ethernet to his house. There’s names for people like that.

Bastid. I live in a ‘brawdbaynd poverty hotspot’, where those useless shysters BT bung too many people onto too few ADSL lines, and don’t spend any of their enormous profits on new infrastructure. About 5am, I might get 4 meg (out of an advertised ‘up to’ 8 meg). If I’m lucky. At peak evening times, between 6-11pm, I’m lucky to see half a meg. I still pay full whack for it though. 😥

Cheer up little Elf; new-type fibre cable coming soon….

Bob > http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html

You should be able to log in to your router to look at the connection speed.

Thanks for that! I have 3.5 of my so called 20 meg bt sold it to me on 😈

its astonishing, its gonna spoil all other internets for me though.

but I can save films/programmes/etc from the Vbox on to USB, that has me pretty chuffed to.

My god I’m so glad I didn’t go for BT vision again!!

For reference,

I have Sky’s “up to 20Mb” connection. The router claims to connect at 13Mbps. The Speed tester shows a practical speed of about 7.5Mbps.

Bear in mind that the latter measures speeds between you and a remote server, so it will be affected by problems on the Internet and any other devices sharing your connection. The direct connection speed between your router and the exchange will always be a bit higher (though in my case that’s quite worryingly disparate).

virgin is fast

Most i’ve recorded is 120mbps but always above 60mbps

1.05Mbs 🙁

yep, vmedia quote 50mb, I can has 72.0mbps

yes 72 meg….

This is more like it,

http://www.skyuser.co.uk/speedtester/

That’s coming out at about 10Mbps, which is a bit more like what I expected to see.

1.03Mbs on the Skyuser test 🙁

This is supposed to be Tiscali 8meg…..

Oh, and you can blame Facha for this. She sold off all the telecommunications infrastructure, but instead of this encouraging competition, as claimed, it ended up with BT having a monopoly because they own all the physical infrastructure, which is why most of Britain has crap internets compared to most other ‘developed’ countries. Instead of investing in infrastructure, BT has instead concentrated on generating maximum profits. With little benefit to all customers who have been reliant on the BT-owned hardware. Other ISPs are limited to whatever speed BT can provide.It’s rubbish. The infrastructure should’ve bin retained by the State, who would now benefit enormously from renting out services to all the ISPs.

Enjoy it while you can, Nutt; when everyone else gets fibre cable, your speeds will drop dramatically. 😈

I’d imagine it’s an obscene, disgusting grot-fest in your house right now. 😀

(Is very jealous)

How much pm, if you don’t mind me asking?

£40pcm, includes TV & unlimited telephobe

I’m now playing find the lowest speed I can on the speed testers, above is the slackest I can muster at the moment.

Mines totally rubbish 🙁

Speed Down 1543.59 Kbps ( 1.5 Mbps )
Speed Up 370.31 Kbps ( 0.4 Mbps )

I think the nearest cable is about 10 miles from my house in a different town – we won’t be getting it for a looooooooooonnnnnngggg time.

oh I got lower!!

I can’t believe its gonna take me a whole 2mins to download an 800mb movie file, that’s not even long enough to make a bloody cup of tea!

0.3 mb yes 0.3
I use mobile broadband it is like dial
When I download stuff like open office it takes hours for 100 mb programmes

TBH for most practical purposes, above about 8meg you don’t notice the difference. Normally the server at the other end limits you more than your connection.

E.g. measured 8Mb down, 1.5 up at home, about 200-300 down, 90 up at work. Only time i’ve ever got anything like that pace off a remote server (other than testing) is MS downloading OS images.

I had 7.5mbps on BTvision, seriously, you really can notice the difference with this shizzle, damn its fast!!

Bizarrely I get faster results via Speedtest on my HTC Desire HD than I do on my HP Pavilion laptop

So explain this to a numpty like me. I currently have BT broad band with a wireless thingy so I can STW downstairs.

It is okay but not that fast.

I switch to Virgin and they do what, surely the use the same lines to the house or do they dig up my front garden?
Do I still need to pay for the BT line?
If I switch, can I keep my land line number?
Anything else I need to be aware of?

well, we have the fiber installed around Swinedum, it then runs on coax to the house, forty quid gives HDtv, 50meg broadband and unlimited phonecalls. Nothing to do with BT, thank god!

they also don’t choke the traffic during peak times like BT etc apparently

dunno if you can keep your BT number, probably.

I switch to Virgin and they do what, surely the use the same lines to the house or do they dig up my front garden?

It doesn’t use the BT cable, it’s fibre – kinda like cable TV.

Do I still need to pay for the BT line?
If I switch, can I keep my land line number?

As I understand it, you still need to pay BT line rental if you keep your phone line. Unlike ADSL, you could have it disconnected if you wanted (but then you wouldn’t have a land line).

nope, no BT line rental here.

Other ISPs are limited to whatever speed BT can provide.It’s rubbish.

To a point. This is true of most conventional ADSL, whichever ISP you go with it’s simply BT Wholesale chopped up and resold. However, ISPs can now install their own equipment in BT exchanges – this is the “LLU” you may have heard of. With LLU, you typically get lower prices and lower contention.

Virgin’s offering isn’t ADSL, so this doesn’t really apply. It’s nothing to do with BT. (I wonder how long it is before Virgin get slapped with the same “open up access to your network” order that BT did…)

You can transfer your existing landline number to Virgin – feels just like a BT line.

Connection is fibre to the street cabinet and coax to the home. Coax is way superior for high speed data transmission than twisted pair, which is what your ADSL line is.

well that wasn’t two minutes, rather it took 18 minutes to download a full movie, that’ll do 😀

Super slow internet down here in Surrey, with the infamous BT.

How do you go about transferring your movies etc to a USB stick, as I thought it was only possible to transfer to a CD burner?

500kbps on a good day.. BT out in the sticks package.. today is exceptionally good

A bit of a slow evening. 🙂

ooofya! cranberry thats monstrous!

sod the speed contest….I want to know how the hell you get the Vbox stuff onto USB, i though they disabled the port on the back.

ah what the heck….10mb line is enough for me, any faster and I’d go blind

It’s not all roses – they limit my newsgroup downloads to 50Gb per month. 🙁

I dunno how you cope with that cranberry, thats a **** liberty that is!

and the engineer that installed the Vbox said, yep, its got a USB port on the back, in response to my question, can I pull saved programs straight off the box?

it must also have 3 tuners in it as I can record 2 channels and watch a different one.

Geek mode
Don’t forget you’ve got

Kilobit,Kilobytes Megabits and Megabytes

So the speedtest.net is showing Megabits per second NOT Megabytes

1 Mbit is equal to 125 kilobytes