New install

Was told i would only get 61 down and 20 up but engineer said i am getting 79 down max and can handle 29 up
http://www.speedtest.net/result/2399157378.png
1st speed test of the day

new test on a better server http://www.speedtest.net/result/2399170750.png

For you neither of those are "good servers". Douglas IoM can use what is often a congested cable route and London at 350 miles is too far and has too many nodes. Try to find a local one less than 50 miles away from you - it may be trial and error and some may still route "the long way round".

I'm not so sure that is the correct approach, does it not depend on where his ISP is based or more importantly where his data exits from his ISP's network in to the big wide world ?

I'm in the far reaches of Kent, but tend to get better results from Sheffield (Near Plusnet?) and Maidenhead, my local servers have always given poor results.

In reply to a post by MHC:

Try to find a local one less than 50 miles away from you

That advice is usually good for the US where cable firms have internet PoP's in each "city" area - but in the UK where ISPs data is often encapsulated within a wholesale backbone (from any vendor) the actual physical location of the user and the speed test server has often zero impact.

Load on the speed test server is more the problem

In reply to a post by R0NSKI:

I'm in the far reaches of Kent, but tend to get better results from Sheffield (Near Plusnet?) and Maidenhead, my local servers have always given poor results.

My understanding the Maidenhead server (run by uno from these forums) has quite a large amount of connectivity - multiple gigabit - and other servers are on 100meg or less. That isn't shown by Speedtest.net anywhere.

Also I thought PlusNet had interconnect points at the various London exchange points rather than actually in Sheffield. Seems a long (and costly) way to move bandwidth up to sheffield.

I did say trial and error at the end ... I would hope teh ISP is not routing everything through London especially from what sounds to be somewhere in the North of Scotland.

Strangely my most consistent one is in Sittingbourne - diagonally opposite across London from me!

Most UK ISPs do route everything via London because of the way BTW provides the service to them.
Although they can chose to route via somewhere else if they wont, it wouldn't be a good idea as they are likely to peer with other ISPs in London anyway.
There is supposedly a Manchester internet exchange as well, but very few ISPs use it; nothing north of that, so even using that route you'd have Scotland->Manchester->Scotland although Scotland->London->Scotland is by far the more common.

Infinity routes internal to the BT network Winchester->Sheffield->Ilford; and to reach Xilo or Uni in Sheffield it appears to route Winchester->Sheffield->Ilford->Sheffield.

They've removed the names of many of the BT internal routers, so it's harder to be sure that is what is happening; the intermediate ones with the increased hop time used to be explicitly named with a 'shef' in them. I'd be interested if anyone had a different interpretation of this tracert.

Tracing route to sheffield.ac.uk [143.167.2.101]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.254 <<< Winchester
2 15 ms 15 ms 14 ms 217.32.147.100 <<< includes around 8ms interleaving
3 15 ms 15 ms 15 ms 217.32.147.142
4 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms 212.140.206.82 <<< +4ms, for hop from south to north ?
5 19 ms 18 ms 18 ms 217.41.169.251
6 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms 217.41.169.109
7 18 ms 19 ms 18 ms 109.159.251.239
8 28 ms 27 ms 27 ms core1-te0-12-0-6.ilford.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.251.133] <<< +4 for hop from north to south, plus slow response to ping
9 29 ms 31 ms 35 ms peer3te-0-3-1-0.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [62.172.102.9]
10 24 ms 26 ms 24 ms 195.99.125.18
11 26 ms 26 ms 25 ms ae0.lond-sbr4.ja.net [146.97.35.109]
12 26 ms 26 ms 27 ms ae13.lond-sbr1.ja.net [146.97.33.133]
13 29 ms 29 ms 29 ms as3.leed-sbr1.ja.net [146.97.33.97] <<< +3 for hop from south to north
14 32 ms 33 ms 31 ms YHMAN-L1.site.ja.net [146.97.42.26]
15 31 ms 30 ms 30 ms v795.sff-d01.yhman.net.uk [194.81.2.75]
16 31 ms 31 ms 32 ms cpop1.shffu.yhman.net.uk [195.195.130.34]
17 34 ms 32 ms 32 ms 143.167.254.234
18 * * * Request timed out.
...

London seems to give me the best results http://www.speedtest.net/result/2399753413.png
If i try Aberdeen i get bad results cause its a poor server
I live in Kilmarnock in Ayrshire so thats a good result for me