EXTREMELY slow download speeds

Hey guys,

Just wondered what you think.

At the moment (at this time) I am having extremely slow download speeds. My results of the speed test I just did were...

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results/id/117433042016970418441.html

Basically 0.4 up and down. Now this is on a connection that should supposidly receive 8mbps (not up to 8, BT says 8... but of course it will vary).

I have had downloads at around 700kbps, if not more sometimes.

However, trying to download school work from box.net (a 40mb file) and its as slow as 29 kbps??

No idea why. The connection is shared but is NOT being used (my laptop is just connected, nothing else - nothing that could cause a big drop like that).

It was the same yesterday as well.

You don't think Orange are "shaping" my data do you?

Im currently on the Wanadoo Plus BB Staff offer (basically

Remember your download speed will vary due to several reasons.

1. Loading on your ISP, speed will always drop when more people are online, this occurs with most ISP's

2. Loading on the server you trying to download from, more people trying to download the slower it is.

3. Line contension.

Don't always take the speed tests as gospel either, I think sometimes that's congested too and leads to wrong results, probably too many people doing speed tests all the time clogging the net up , I know I've done too many testing out my new orange max connection. They say a good test is go to a huge site like Microsoft and download something (anything) off their servers for a good indication of actual speed, if you're getting faster speeds from there then it's obviously problem with other sites(s) being congested.

For example I was getting about 0.8mb from the speed test here the other evening which I thought was wrong, so downloaded something from Microsoft and it was whizzing along at 450kb's which indcates speeds more of around 4mb.

Edited by notawhizzkid (Wed 21-Mar-07 11:59:45)