News, Articles and Case Studies

13 Nov 2007

Look out Broadband Providers! – We are coming after you!

Hi Folks, Any of you feeling disappointed with your broadband download speeds? Did the lovely salesman tell you on the phone you would be getting 8mb of band width? Well, what they mean is…”up to 8mb”. All the major broadband providers will give you a contention ratio of 1:50 which means that you are sharing your 8MB with 50 other users. Probably explains why your connection speed is rubbish at peak times.

Anyway, the Gadget Show have started a campaign to make these companies be a bit more truthful about the service that they are providing. They have set up a device on their website that will measure your broadband performance and log the results for you.

Do your broadband test here

Here is what ours looked like…….

broadband

Fantastic, isn’t it? We are a web design company for goodness sake!!

Anyway we are in the process of changing our service provider to a company who have promised a much better contention ratio of 1:2.5. So I will let you all know how it goes. In the mean time join the campaign if you aren’t happy with your broadband service.

Any thoughts anyone?

Toni 

  • http://paulenderson.com Paul Enderson

    That’s a handy tool – thanks! :) My connection is a 1MB freebie with Orange, and scored 1013/246 (so exact;y what it should be).

  • toni

    Paul
    Glad to hear you are getting what you pay for (or don’t pay for). Since writing this we have changed providers and it has made some difference but I think there is a lot of noise on our line which is quite intermittent. This is probably where some of the problem lies but every time we ask BT to check it they say there is nothing wrong with it (how they are checking it and not actually coming to our premesis I don’t know!)
    The saga continues…..

  • http://paulenderson.com Paul Enderson

    I went through a phase of noise on the line recently… It turned out to be a combination of a dodgy extension cable and an old ADSL filter. I replaced both, and haven’t had any issues since!