What broadband speed do you get? Mine has just doubled.....

[Norm]

We're 8km from the exchange, so we were on 0.5mbps until the end of last year. Then we switched to cable and things improved... by a factor of 100!

That's just run with the AV turned on and both kids using computers, so I'm pretty sure it would hit the 50mbps quoted speed without a problem.

That figure should also double soon, I think we're due to go to 120mbps. Which is nice.

 

[marinyork]

How do you people with 1 or 2 mbs survive?!

I'm genuinely surprised, I thought most people had access to reasonably fast broadband nowadays? My 30 mbs is in a large village a few miles from the centre of Nottingham, so not exactly in the wilderness, but not in the centre of a big city either.

It would be perfectly all right to survive on a 2Mbs that was not contended very badly and had a low ping, so long as you weren't using it for heavy video. The problem with a lot of people on these sorts of connections is they are very unstable or may be contended very badly. A rock solid 2Mbs would be fine. Unfortunately these people aren't on that.

Broadband coverage is pretty poor particularly in bits of Scotland. This is perhaps not totally surprising when you look at the number of premises on some exchanges. However the public provision hasn't been anywhere near generous enough even taking this into account. Wales is problematic. Northern Ireland by contrast is excellent for superfast availability (although NI is poor for LLU - one reason this happened) and few take up the option.

Cable covers about 55% of the UK population. BT's plan will have their system upto about 70% of the population. There are other systems, a county wide level put in a 3rd fibre optic system. Unfortunately some other counties haven't copied us. It's a real, real shame they haven't copied us. Pots of cash have been given out recently for 'rural' broadband in various counties, it'll be interesting to see what's happened. Doseone just benefitted from a programme by Wales.

If you look at BT infinity in detail there are some big winners for semi rural, small town people even in Scotland. For example several of the people who complain about broadband here in England and how they'll never get anything decent will be able to get BT infinity in the next year or so. It's pot luck. Doseone's exchange has only just had 21CN network switched on. A similar exchange on the outskirts of Aberdeen which is a very small exchange has only just had 21CN switched on, but it's about to get BT infinity and leap frog a lot of other places. Rural english exchanges are generally a lot better off than those in Wales and Scotland. But 30% of the population is a lot...

 

[musa]

Ive got a 10mb package from Virgin the L one

just done a test 9/30 d/l speed and 0.91 u/l with 74ms to London server well not bad

EDIT: REDONE after closing some tabs 9.89 d/l 1.02 u/p 45ms ping

 

[soulful dog]

I stay in a city, live about half a mile from the exchange, and until fairly recently when a couple of ISPs offered LLU, my connection was 6Mb. I've now moved to Be's LLU service and get 10-12Mb with them. Unfortunately since I've joined Be they seem to be going downhill!

I can't get cable in my area, and BT Infnity doesn't even have an indication of ever being available at my exchange, never mind a specific date.

 

[machew]

I stay in a city, live about half a mile from the exchange, and until fairly recently when a couple of ISPs offered LLU, my connection was 6Mb. I've now moved to Be's LLU service and get 10-12Mb with them. Unfortunately since I've joined Be they seem to be going downhill!

I can't get cable in my area, and BT Infnity doesn't even have an indication of ever being available at my exchange, never mind a specific date.

Same here for most of Birmingham

 

[marinyork]

We've got fibre optic cable. Speed's about 40-70mb/s and the line is rated at 60 mb/s. Upload speed is still only 5mb/s though!

Cable coverage here is supposed to be about 95%. Don't know how realistic that is though.

The figure I quoted above is fairly meaningless for the UK because sadly it's a patchwork bodged job on a street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood and town by town level. However if you're interested what this means there are several maps including this one courtesy of SamKnows

Not much res, but enough to show what many people don't know - that contrary to popular myth a fair few small towns, villages and 'rural' areas particularly in the 'east midlands' can get cable. It also illustrates another point about BT infinity - they will have a higher coverage than this and there will be a lot of semi-'country' folk who'll be able to get it by about 2015.

 

[marinyork]

Same here for most of Birmingham

Same for 'everywhere'. There are plenty of exchanges not listed, that's just how it is. There are 13 exchanges in the Glasgow area listed in one form or another on infinity's website. It doesn't mean your exchange will never be done. It doesn't mean much either way infact. It's the same for many. There were at least two people I can think of on here saying almost identical things living in much smaller towns and both their local exchanges are now showing up to be done one day in the next couple of years. It's a shame Glasgow missed out on the (tiny) pot of money put towards big cities in the budget.

I would say it is pretty likely exchanges like Rutherglen, Merrylee and Croftfoot, Central will get infinity. Some of the other outer ones and/or in poorer areas may be unlucky though. A lot of the non-listed blank exchanges will be done in 2014 and 2015.

It took a long time getting exchanges broadband enabled and then ADSLmax enabled. It's just now that a lot of people have broadband they have forgotten this.

 

[fossyant]

Got an 'upto' 20mbs package, but usually get 11mbs. I'm less than a mile from an exchange.

 

[fossyant]

I can get infinity - any great reason for switching from a decent broadband (apart form the huge speed increase) ? Currently pay just short of £30 a month, calls and line rental included.

 

[Garz]

Ive got a 10mb package from Virgin the L one

just done a test 9/30 d/l speed and 0.91 u/l with 74ms to London server well not bad

EDIT: REDONE after closing some tabs 9.89 d/l 1.02 u/p 45ms ping

Im on the same package, cant be too far from the local cabinet. Here are the results:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1935989204.png

 

[Garz]

Rebooted router as that looked odd:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1935995731.png

 

[MrJamie]

I can get infinity - any great reason for switching from a decent broadband (apart form the huge speed increase) ? Currently pay just short of £30 a month, calls and line rental included.

It depends what you do and what youre getting now, for some its a godsend for others its just more bandwidth.

You tend to get better latency (ping times) which is good for online gaming, but its not a big difference if your already on a good broadband connection. Having a website respond or a download start 6 milliseconds quicker isnt going to be noticable

The main thing is the bandwidth, for people on say under 2mb connections, watching tv online might struggle, downloads may take an age, so youd really notice the internet start working properly. Also if youve got a number of adults/teenagers in your house you dont get slowed down by what other people are doing. Youd notice download speed if you downloaded movies/games for example, instead of a movie taking say 2 hours to download from itunes it could take <5 minutes.

If your computer is crap and slow, itll still be crap and slow. If some websites are particularly slow, theyll still be slow.

For me the main differences arere that you can have people watching iplayer in different rooms, while downloading, while someones playing online games. Occasionally I download a large file, like the Windows 8 test or Diablo3 beta and a 3gb file is down in 5 minutes. Its expensive though, especially when you factor in that what you pay to BT never seems to be close to what they say on their website.

 

[Norm]

Having gone from under 0.5 to over 50 in December, +1 to all of Jamie's comments. Particularly...

For me the main differences arere that you can have people watching iplayer in different rooms, while downloading, while someones playing online games. Occasionally I download a large file, like the Windows 8 test or Diablo3 beta and a 3gb file is down in 5 minutes. Its expensive though, especially when you factor in that what you pay to BT never seems to be close to what they say on their website.

... the gaming thing. My son had to stop whatever he was playing online if anything else connected. And, given the number of phones we have which would connect randomly to download weather updates or whatever, that could / would happen at random points through the day.

Now, we can all be hammering whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it in the knowledge that there will be spare bandwidth. I know that, in paying for the maximum available, we have bought more than we need but I'm happy to be doing that for the headroom.

 

[Paul J]

This is what I get

 

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

How do you people with 1 or 2 mbs survive?!

I'm genuinely surprised, I thought most people had access to reasonably fast broadband nowadays? My 30 mbs is in a large village a few miles from the centre of Nottingham, so not exactly in the wilderness, but not in the centre of a big city either.

Patience and plenty of time on your hands.

Quite a few of the people I know are 'technically' still on dial-up only. They get around it using satelite broadband instead - 1 receiver and a lot of ethernet cabling between the 5 or 6 houses... it works better than dial-up and they get around 2Mb/s from it each.

Where I used to live we started off with about 6Mb/s but it degraded to 2.5Mb/s after a couple of years (nothing to do with IT Equipment - I was an IT Engineer), but then we were in the heart of "rural" surrey with private water supply, septic tank, no gas, no cable and only intermittant electricty and in theory no freeview... and forget having your bins emptied - you had to take them 1/2 mile to the bottom of the track for that to happen....

My parents are on 0.5Mb/s but I personally think there is a fault on their line that they won't do anything about...
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1937302423.png