Broadband speed - recommended tester site?

I use the ThinkBroadband one at:

They seem to give differing results. ThinkBroadband is currently reporting 18 Mbps on my nominal 20 Mbps cable connection whilst the BT speedtest reports 17 Mbps and

It's how long your data packets take to cross the Internet, rather than how fast they travel. Compare a travel report that tells you you have a clear 70 mph run down a motorway, but your destination is 2 hours away.

Latency is important to people playing online games, as the latency is added on to their reaction time. So a long latency means they've been shot by an opponent before they can even see their opponent on-screen. Lowish latency is also useful for 2-way audio/video calling, such as Skype and equivalents.

If you are streaming data in one direction, such as watching online video or downloading files/web pages, latency isn't particularly important (unless it's so long that it interferes with acknowledgement packets).

Great: you should get BT to pay you to add that nice lucid, real-world description to their page Graham! Thanks a lot.

BTW I know what a ping is (I was working in computing [as an info officer] when we routinely used ping to find if a host was alive. However BT's use of the jargon on that page is not user-friendly, at all.

John

They both gave me more or less the same speeds. I'd give

That measures download speed in two different ways, and gives a clue as to what you might expect under various circumstances.

Depending on what flavour of ADSL your exchange/ISP is providing, 400k (ish) may be the highest upload speed available. What are the upstream and downstream synch rates and noise margins?

This information would be useful.

However his upload speed may be capped at 448Kbs. Some ISPs will lift the cap if you ask them. YMMV.

seems to be ok and consistent.

Ping time reflects the round trip time for an end to end response of the link. It's an important parameter when using the internet connection in an interactive session such as when playing 1st person shoot 'em ups with others over the internet (internet play).

Too large a Ping time value, eg 70ms or longer, will leave you at a disadvantage compared to other players enjoying 30 or 40ms ping times (between themselves and the game server they've chosen for their network gameplay) since they'll be able to blow you away before you've had a chance to dodge incoming fire.

Your figures tell me one thing straight away and that is; you're not with a cable ISP (effectively VM - are there any other cable companies in the UK?).

Just to make you feel bad, here's my results from speedtest.net;

Chosen endpoint server is about 45 miles away, hence the tight ping times.

Just for laughs, I chose a closer end point server (also not part of VM's network) less than ten miles from me;

As you can see, choosing a closer end point doesn't necessarilly improve ping times or speed. Although in this second case, the speed figures are within a percent or so of each other between the chosen servers, the ping times being the biggest difference (and in the opposite sense to what one might have expected!).

You don't need me to tell you that I'm on the standard 30Mbps VM cable broadband service (35,000,000 bps, actually) with the 2Mbps U/L speed option as opposed to the dearer and slightly less stingy 3Mbps U/L option.

The speed.net results reflect my local connection speed as supplied by VM and reported by the VM Superhub cable modem/router.

It might not be too obvious to you but most of the rest of the internet cannot match those local cable speeds. Indeed, a good portion of it won't even match your existing D/L speed (yeah, hard to believe, I know).

BTW, your U/L speed isn't quite as crap as you might suppose (it's just under 10% of the download speed which is a typical ratio in the asymetric use of the link bandwidth budget over the local line (be it ADSL or Cable). In my case, I'm only getting 5.7%, well short of the 'accepted' 10% for the U/L link speed.

HTH & HAND :-)

here's mine just default setting after getting my new virgin superhub 2

imac

iPad using 5GHz

---------------------------------

at work

it'd be great for game playing :-(

Nope, its not, its what we get here on VM its only when you get to servers somewhat outside Europe it drops of a bit etc...

The Beeb used to be good. I wouldn't trust some of the private ones as they may have an interest in you changing ISP and so reporting slower rates on your current one. Rusty

Try OOKLA

Obviously the 150Mbps service. :-)

I doubt whether the mighty Microsoft and Nvidia servers will match your D/L link speed. You'll probably have to download from a well seeded torrent to saturate the link (or use one of those download managers that cheats by pretending to be more than client grabbing the same but different parts of the file).

You're not kidding! I'd assume joining a network game on that connection would be a "Sackable Offence", or, at the very least, lumber you with an official warning.

If you're well in with the boss (or you _are_ the Boss) you might be able to persuade him (or you) to let you try it out of hours. :-)

To be perfectly honest, the 30Mbps service is more than ample for my needs, even the "Retentions" service (5 or 10Mbps) would do for most of my interweb activity (it would have seemed like an indulgent luxury not so many years ago - I remember when the lowest speed offering was a mere 128Kbps (successively upgraded "For Free" to 150Kbps -> 2Mbps

-> 4Mbps -> 10Mbps -> 30Mbps!).

Oh no it hasn't.

They can easily determine what ISP you're routed through. If it's one of their friends they could show a good figure and a poor one if not.

Yep, just felt I had to go for it.

yes I'll have to fiodn somethink to give it a test. A major apple system system update would be good test but I've noticed the apples servers can;t always handle it themselves.

A difficult one to judge as I think I could at lunchtime, but then perhaps it would adversly affect other services in the lab, although I'm connected to the same switch as are the other 24 or so PCs here.

Did so a while ago but didn't have a suitable game I could try it on.

It is amazing when I think how long it took to copy from one floopy to another on a macplus.

I didn;t really go for the full download speed, it was the upload speed that attracted me as putting video files on youtube seemed to take ages and that was just SD or lower res. let alone what HD would have taken.

====snip====

I suppose it's still a lot cheaper than a 12Mbps up, 12Mbps down symetric DSL service (only you get the bonus of a 150Mbps download speed).