Internet Speed! :(

[heza121]

Heya all!

So basically, we are with Talk Talk, they provide us with our internets, we pay for the 8mb deal and have done so for like 5 years or longer. It has never been close to that. Recently it has really slowed up, so thinking it may be the router we went out and bought a nice shiny new one :stuart: BUT its still really slow. We have done several different speed tests on all the laptops and pc's around the house, and our current speeds are around: Download 1.68mb and Upload 0.63 <-- amazing right!

So we have called up Talk Talk and they claim its nothing to do with them, its our router or our computers so we got angry at them... :O

Now, BT Infinity was recently installed where we live (like 6 months ago) and they estimate we could get around 72mb Download and 15mb Upload for just £10 more than what we pay for Talk Talk. This sounded really good so I got talking to the online chatty lady on their website and I asked her "Are we guaranteed to get those speeds?" to which she replied "No-one guarantees internet speeds..." I was like oh..okay then.. :/ and the convo sorta hit a wall!

Does anyone know why our internet is soooo shockingly baaaaad!?!?!?! It is literally killing me! :'(
And do you reckon the BT infinity sounds good? Should we go for it?
What about a new phoneline? :S Me no no?

Thanks everyone!

 

[Music Guy123]

Nobody ever gets the full speed of the package they pay for for their Internet. However, don't bt have a thing you can use to find the speed you are likely to get from them? It may be worth doing the test if you can find it. I don't know why it has suddenly slowed up though could be any number of reasons. I would definatelt recommend going infinity it is very fast! Although you won't get the full 72mb, it will still be a very significant speed bump.

P.S. You think 1.68mb download speed is bad? You should try a download speed of 0.22mb :S!

 

[Rakk]

ine chatty lady on their weband I asked her "Are we guaranteed to get those speeds?" to which she replied "No-one guarantees internet speeds..."

Nobody ever gets the full speed of the package they pay for for their Internet.

Actually, if you get cable (Virgin Media) you are pretty much guaranteed the speed they advertise (to within a few kb), though this can only happen if you live in a cabled area, but yeah if you need to use a BT line the advertised speed is never guaranteed.

 

[Jack Guinea]

Im with talk talk and mine has gone down from 4.7 MB download and 1.1 MB upload to 1.3 MB download and 0.03 MB upload

 

[heza121]

P.S. You think 1.68mb download speed is bad? You should try a download speed of 0.22mb :S!

Im with talk talk and mine has gone down from 4.7 MB download and 1.1 MB upload to 1.3 MB download and 0.03 MB upload

Ouch!! Thats even worse than ours! I dont't know how I would cope! Sometimes we cant even load the Speed Test Page!!

BT Infinity we would get around those speeds it could be 5mb slower than what they estimate but should be faster? If we got BT Infinity does it come via the Phone-line or fibre? Like how does it get into your house? haha!

 

[Kalisnoir]

Yeah I can vouch for Virgin Media, I live in a village and my house is set back from the road, so the guys came down and dug the cables from the road to the house for us (for free). The exchange is in town about 2 miles away (I'm furthest person from the exchange) & on 30mb package I actually get 31/32mb down. Virgin Media use Fibre Optic, not sure about BT but I image to get that kind of speed it would have to be Fibre Optic.

 

[DeadEyeDuk]

DED's Interwebs Speed

Advertised: 72meg
Likely to receive in my area: 48meg
Max dl speed (granted via Wireless router): 4mb/s

 

[tom_gr7]

I'm pretty sure BT infinity uses hybrid of fibre optic and normal lines, whereas virgin is 100% fibre optic.

If I could, I'd go for virgin fibre optic (if you can) if not go for infinity, it's still going to be a massive upgrade on normal BB.

 

[F3AR]

Are you remembering the fact they are using megabit whilst you're all using megabyte? ...

 

[SimonG]

Nobody ever gets the full speed of the package they pay for for their Internet. However, don't bt have a thing you can use to find the speed you are likely to get from them? It may be worth doing the test if you can find it. I don't know why it has suddenly slowed up though could be any number of reasons. I would definatelt recommend going infinity it is very fast! Although you won't get the full 72mb, it will still be a very significant speed bump.

P.S. You think 1.68mb download speed is bad? You should try a download speed of 0.22mb :S!

A bit of an over exaggeration I'm with Virgin. 50/5Mbit. I'm getting 51/5.5Mbit.

As to why your connection might be so slow, if the problems occurs on all connected devices,
and you've already tried changing the router, then to me it sounds like the problem is somewhere in your connection from your house to your ISP.
Whether your ISP can improve in this area is impossible for me to say. :<

Good luck though!

 

[mishra]

I was with TalkTalk for over 3 years. They increased the price for me and put me on different deal, when I changed my house meanwhile - claiming they cannot keep my old contract in place! I was paying for up to 8Mbps but never got more than 3.5Mbps!
Had to restart router every 2 days.. in order to keep decent speeds. Was complaining 3 times, and got sent 2 diff routers. Routers made little difference... 2nd one had broken wireless, and 3rd one kept disconnecting... I threw the towel! Never again, that rubbish company!

I'm now with Viring Media. Paying £17.50 for up to 30Mbps, just checked right now with speedtest: ping: 9ms, download: 31.58Mbps, upload: 1.97Mbps
Cannot ask for better service! Virgin is amazing.. at least for me. Definitively recommend

 

[Enflame]

I am just putting this out there. But most of these companies have a very clever marketing poly to make you swap and that is not aactually giving you the correct statistic. They give there read outs in mega bits however we all download things in megabytes per second. A mega bit is significantly smaller then a bytes and allows the speed to sound much higher than it is I believe there is 8 bits to a byte what ever number you are gven by the phone company ypou must divide it by that number and you get your download per mb/s speed that you were promised hope that shed some light on this.

 

[Music Guy123]

I know the reason why I have got such a slow internet! It is because I live 5 miles away from the last point of fibre optic connection. Therefore, I have five miles of copper cable! Which kills me! True, some people get exactly what they pay for but, in general, most people don't get the exact amount, normally it is slightly less.

 

[JamesMLB]

I'm back on the forums after nearly 6 months!!!

I'm with Orange at the moment, and our speed has dropped from 2.9 mb down and 0.3 up to 0.9 down and 0.3 up because we have decided to make the switch to BT Infinity 2.
Our predicted speed is 60mb tho but its going to be a difference at least
It's getting installed on the 23rd

 

[Craigsup]

Talk talk offer cheap fire optics. We've recently upgraded from normal broadband to fibre. Before I got 4mb/s but now I get around 30mb/s. Download speeds of 2.5-3.5mb/s. They run fibre optics to your nearst green box from the exchange and then use the existing copper wire from the green box to your house. Copper wire is fine for short distance - we lose no speed at all (the engineer checked this about 5 times).
Talk talk are fairly cheap for fibre optics but you still get fantastic speeds!

 

[bencot]

I live approx 2 miles from the closest exchange, im with sky and I get 1.23 down and 0.51 up. It truly is awful, hopefully moving somewhere with fibre optic soon though.