Faster Speed [A myth]

Trying to find a faster provider in a specific geographic areas seems a rather futile, if not completely academic, exercise.

I, along with 56 other potential users, live in a development which was created between four and six years ago when, at the outset, broadband was not available because of distance from our local exchange. In 2003 it became available when one resident bravely subscribed via BT and was able to achieve about 950Kbps via a fixed, reliable, service capped at 1Mbps. Slowly, slowly, other residents joined the revolution as, slowly, slowly, the contention issue became apparent and most of the newer subscribers were on something between 250Kbps and 750Kbps. Then, the mystical

Sorry but you are wrong "The same old copper wire" is not sharing it's capacity between the users. Everyone has their own copper pair back to the exchange. What you are all seeing is contention on the central bearers.

Rubbish. Your speed is largely determined by the congestion on the ISP's network and, to a lesser extent, on BT's.

My normal speed is in excess of 6,000Kbps with IDNet.

You should find yourself some decent ISPs, not just those who advertise the most.

Thanks, MHC.

In which case, Bill, how do you account for the fact that the speeds achieved via twelve different ISPs, including one business which uses IDNet, is the same? I spoke to the IDNet user this evening who tells me when he queried poor d/l speed IDNet blamed BT's old cables.

OK, I re-read your OP more carefully... my bad . The problem is your line length, it sounds like about 2Mbps is the most you'll get as a sync speed.

The slow download speeds in office hours could be a number of things, but I'd guess the most likely is simple contention somewhere between the exchange and IDNet's own network (ditto for the other ISPs, depending who they are, some are just plain overloaded anyway).

Do you have anything like an industrial estate on the same exchange that could be hogging the available bandwidth? Business users get higher priority as a rule...

In reply to:

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In my view, the moral of the story is that there really is no point in making comparisons with a view to finding and switching to an ISP with a

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It is so easy to blame BT especially as you know very little. The age of the cable does make some difference. Te older copper cables were of a heavier gauge and will thus have less attenuation and allow a higher speed. I know of at least one installation where to te best of te occupants knowledge the incoming cables are over 50 years old.

Thanks, Bill.
As the crow flies, we're three miles from the exchange. There are several smallish business parks and trading estates and a coupe of urban villages between the exchange and us. There's no doubt that a huge number of other subscribers are taking a slice of the available bandwidth before us. For the time being, irrespective of ISP, I think we have to content oursleves with 2Mbps on a good day/night, when we're lucky.

Thanks, pitnicker.
Most routers are plugged direct into the BT master socket so I guess it's likely to be other issues compounded by distance from the exchange. I've stuck with BT simply because I believe they have the primary backbone and, it seems, when other ISPs have problems, they're obliged to get BT [Openreach] to sort them.