Broadband speeds...

[Edit]

I currently get my home broadband through sky, and if I'm honest, it's piss poor. "up to 20mb" is currently returning a download speed of 160kb/s. I know it's dependant on location, but a mate lives literally just round the corner and gets twice the speed.

I'm not bothered about the sky tv so I think I'm going to try another ISP. Talktalk sounds like a plan. I'm gutted that I can't get virgin.

My main question is if I switch providers, Is it likely that my speed will increase? Or am I stuck with what might as well be dial-up?

 

[Bucko]

Have you tried speaking to Sky? I'm on the Virgin 20mb package and realised i was only getting about 3mb a while back so i phoned them and they sorted it out straight away, now getting about 18mb.

I've heard bad things about TalkTalk...

 

[Edit]

Spoken to them.

Their attitude was basically "you get what you get".

My house was only built in 2004, why on earth did they not lay the cable for virgin while it was being built?

 

[Bucko]

As far as I understand your town either has cable access or it doesn't, it's not individual houses. I know how you feel though, my BT internet ran no more than 2mb in my old house regardless of what package i got

 

[Tyler@Ultimate]

Yeah same here, as the line exchange line only supports 3mb so I it doesn't matter what ISP I have its down to the line, I did phone them up as ask, they just said its restricted on our cable so they reduced the payment by a tenner.

 

[Edit]

It's a new estate build. The whole estate can't have cable. As I said, my mate who lives on the same estate gets double the speed. Will have to ask one of my next door neighbours how theirs is.

 

[Vish]

We were with pipex getting about 4meg, everyone else were saying the same on their line tests, strangely o2 were saying a bit more. So switched to o2 as they were cheaper and it did go up to 4.5-5meg strangely. A few times it went slow, so a quick call to them and they'd play with their settings and it went back up. Currently getting about 5-5.5.

Our roads were dug up a few yrs ago to lay cable, but apparently nobody wants it so it's not active so will have to make do until lines get upgraded.

 

[Andy.]

Have you run the test from speedtest.net?

 

[Adam]

Its not as the crow flies in relation to your line, its physical line length. Even though your mate lives round the corner and is on the same estate your actual line plant could be considerably longer hence the poor speed.

What a lot of people forget aswell is internal wiring/setup plays a massive part in your speed. How is your Sky router setup i.e is it running off the master BT socket, do you have a lot of extensions etc etc.

You can find out more info via sites like this...

http://www.dslzoneuk.net/socket.php

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/checker2.php

This one should give a bit more info...

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/adslchecker.php

 

[sn00p]

If you're on sky connect then it'll be s**t, because it's shaped to hell and is completely worthless and unusable as broadband.

Search in here as it's come up before.

Or read adslguide.org.uk forums.

If you want broadband that works, you either need to be on sky LLU or find another provider who doesn't shape their traffic to hell.

 

[D4N13L]

My sky has turned shocking lately. It has slowed down so much. I tried contacting sky and they were not interested, just got an e mail back saying it must be my settings, they havent changed ffs.

 

[Edit]

I think Sky must have been watching me...

I've just ran another speedcheck, and my speed has increased slightly, to a download rate of about 210kb/s.

Changing to talktalk will save me about £15 a month so I think I am still going to give it a try.

 

[McBunny]

i would never ever use talk talk

 

[OiNK]

Avoid talk talk, they are utter crap, if you have the option in your area go with bethere or o2, by far the best ISPs I have ever dealt with and their speed is great with no traffic shaping or any of that nonsense.

 

[cadab]

+1 with 02 never had any problems with them, i signed up for there 20meg broadband then a week later they emailed me and said sorry we were misinformed and you can only receive around 8, so they moved me down. Thought it was good customer service to let me know so i could save money.