In reply to a post by orly:

Getting IP Profiles and sync rates is more cumbersome or nearly impossible

Sync speeds yes, IP profile no... if they're on FTTC they can run a BT speedtest as readily as any other.

(Though I'll concede that the BT speedtester isn't always the most co-operative of beasts )

I know IP profile can be got reasonably easily if the speedtester is cooperative and it would be nice info to have. Might add it to the form as an optional field so that anyone who has the info can add it on if they want.

In reply to a post by orly:

Getting IP Profiles and sync rates is more cumbersome or nearly impossible

But that was my point... Getting the IP profile is NOT any harder - it is displayed on the same screen at the end of the BT speedtest.

So running the BT speedtest means that a customer has both bits of data to hand.

Writing that makes me realise that you don't specify *which* speedtester you expect people to use. Perhaps this is an issue.

If you had a gigabit connection and still only got 25Mbit what's the point of calling it a gigabit connection?

I agree, but unfortunately, the UK broadband industry has decided to sell & price services based on the best capability of the technology, and not on the results achieved. It helps BT recoup money invested in that new technology, but it must smell rotten to those in the slow-spots, who only want it to get the same service everyone else has had for years.

Given the charts we've all seen showing VDSL2 supposedly capable of handing out 40Mbit up to about 1KM do we infer that ISPs on the whole aren't up to it or that most people live quite a bit further from their cabinets than they think due to roundabout cable routes?

That graph might represent the theoretical best-attempt by VDSL2. How about the graph in This Ericsson document (page 8, or 43 on-page). It seems to be more realistic, taking into account crosstalk from other lines. That suggests 22Mb at 1km, and 40Mbps within 200m.

Also remember that BT has deployed profile 8c, which is pretty much the lowest power, lowest speed variant of VDSL2; seemingly to reduce the effect of crosstalk.

I agree, though, that this early in deployment we're probably not too heavily subscribed as yet, so we should be nearer the theoretical best.

But to try to decide whether the blame lies with BT or an ISP simply needs more information than you are collecting.

Consider a news post on this site that suggests that only 12% of lines are further than this 1KM distance from the cabinet.

Fascinating article; not one I'd seen before. The graphs really show something other than the words - they really highlight how big a gap there is to jump from "current best implementation" (VDSL) up to "theory".

But it makes a great point that there's a good proportion of the country who could be looking at good things from VDSL - and quite a proportion who would benefit from plain ADSL2+ hosted there too.

Interestingly, isn't it about 12% of lines on market 1 exchanges? I wonder how much of an overlap there is between those 2 sets of 12%.

I'd have hoped the data coming back to me would be closer to this if it was true. So are speedtests duff, equipment not good enough, ISPs slower most of the time or people running other stuff in the background when testing?

Any & all of those. Add in exchange or backhaul congestion as well as ISP slowdowns.

Did you see the Ofcom figures? By their definition, they're seeing "typical" FTTC speeds as 30-36Mbps (ie 30Mbps for 25%ile and 36Mbps for 75%ile). Of course, as the sample is for BT Infinity customers, the subscribers are already guaranteed to have had an estimate of > 15Mbps - and we know how conservative the estimates were.

My personal feeling is that, with FTTC, we're also at the point where the "last-mile" is no longer the significant bottleneck that it used to be. And that the old datacomms practices of "best-effort" and dropping packets are becoming more visible to us. We used to believe that all the equipment from your exchange to the speedtest server and back again was "perfect", and that the speedtester's result gave an accurate reflection of the "last-mile". Now it merely reflects the accumulation of all the limitations in the end-to-end connection - and now the blemishes in the rest of the infrastructure become a little more obvious.

Hopefully as more people take a minute to complete the survey we can all get more data to work with. Subjective of course, but not totally invalid.

And a very good aim, too. I'll be trying to collect my own statistics, when I'm connected (and I'll fill in your survey too). I do for my current 8Mbps service - but it'll be annoying to lose the modem stats. But it makes it many times better if lots of people are collecting & reporting the stats.

In fact... thinking about the Ofcom slides I posted earlier, I was most impressed by that scatter graph that showed Speed vs Exchange-distance with "dots" for each person.

I wonder if we can create a similar speed vs cabinet-distance one.

Cleared it up a bit to default to the BT speedtest. Also included a link to Kitz' site which shows you how to get the IP profiles too.

The "view each entry" page show show each person from now on who adds their IP profile info. This of course assumes that any of the code i've written to sanitise the information put in the text boxes works right and doesn't wreck it all. Don't want some sneaky [censored] to come along and compromise the whole thing with a crafty SQL attack.

Log all input to a transaction database? Then not too difficult to trace the culprit if this happens, and reconstitute the results database?

"Simply it asks you to do a speedtest and/or enter the info if you know it."

If I use the TBB Java speedtest, my XP netbook upload speed is capped at approx 4Mbps. If using the alternative Flash test, I get 8-9Mbps upload. Speedtest.net usually shows approx 6Mbps.

Seems that last night I had in fact broken it when trying to secure it a bit...would seemingly accept the data provided but wouldn't enter anything into the database except blanks.

Had to delete a few responses so if you voted earlier on monday morning then you might need to look through all the entries and see if yours hasn't shown up right.

The form *should* work now. Don't expect shenanigans from users here but no point leaving an HTML form with text boxes linked to a database open to the world to play with. Hopefully my attempts this evening have made it better.

still not sure what you mean

I think he means that participating in a survey would automatically trigger a speed test using your (orly's) choice of test, and that somehow you would know the results even if the respondent didn't post them.

Perhaps, as you know the IP address of the respondent, you could trigger this. I must admit I'm confused as well. Hence my reply to uno at the time.

Maybe as a speedtest.net host he could do that, but .... Quite apart from the questionability of Ookla.

Which reminds me, as I'm no longer on Avira, which destroys Ookla just like Kaspersky, connected wirelessly, speedtest.net,
TBB - 08/04/11 22:01 Fri 14136 Kbps 8249 Kbps,
BT - Download speed achieved during the test was - 35130 Kbps, Upload speed achieved during the test was - 8069 Kbps.

Now that's interesting, to me at least!

Don't see a simple way to do it.

Even if I could "force" a browser to automatically do a speedtest on another site, I'd have no way of automatically getting the results from what I can see. Don't have the bandwidth to host one myself obviously