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

Mine was installed this afternoon. (Got to laugh the checker now says Barnwood has been pushed out to end of March). This is what Maidenhead is showing

I find the most reliable test of download speed is to d/l a Linux distro from ftp.heanet.ie. It maxes out every connection I have tried it on.

DrT

nice, lets hope it holds at that.

I had a slightly higher estimate and also synced at 80/20 initially, but its now sitting at 71/20.

Openreach have suspended installs in my area tho they are investigating a possible cabinet issue as it turns out I am not the only one who had a large loss of signal.

I had a good talk with the engineer about cross talk.
He did say it was a big problem with alot of cabs but was sure that i would be ok. He seem to think that i would not suffer as bad as others and went on to say that we had new cable from the cabinet to our house done last year so it should not be as bad for us. I dont get how the cable being so new would help with crosstalk

Edited by deleted (Sat 29-Dec-12 14:14:41)

In reply to a post by iwish:

... and went on to say that we had new cable from the cabinet to our house done last year so it should not be as bad for us. I dont get how the cable being so new would help with crosstalk

It wont - unless it is totally separate from all others!

Good case of you knowing more than the engineer i'm afraid.

thats good news then.

newer cables may have better twists or not be so tightly bundled together as these may have been designed with data services in mind.

my engineer actually predicted 40mbit for me, based on his knowledge of the d-side.

"newer cables may have better twists or not be so tightly bundled together as these may have been designed with data services in mind."


Nope its the same old stuff we have been using for years and years befor ADSL ect come out.