What happens at the exchange when you switch ISP ?

What actually happens at the exchange when you switch ISP ? I'm considering switching away from Orange for variuos reasons, but I do get a fairly decent speed (5 to 7Mb) considering my location. According to http://www.top10-broadband.co.uk/speedtest/streetstats, my neighbours get much lower speeds than I do, and I'm worried that switching ISP might put my sync rate (8192) at risk, if it involves being moved to a different bit of kit in the exchange.

I accept that congestion within each ISP's network cannot be accounted for here, I'm just talking about my speed from here to the exchange.

Any ideas ?

Cheers !

If you change from one BT-based provider to another, nothing generally but if you go from 20CN to 21CN, a bod in a van goes and changes the connection over.

If you go from BT-based to LLU, or vice-versa, a bod will also go and do that

Matt

Assuming you are on Orange LLU then you would be connected to a different DSLAM.

There is an outside chance that your sync would fall a little but it probably wouldn't. If you went to an IPstream reseller you'd be saddled with the abysmal BT DLM routines that punish you for days or weeks if an unsuppressed motorbike passes so try to stick with LLU if you can.

It's not clear to me if you are on an ADSL2+ package either as that sync is very close to the ADSL maximum - if it is ADSL then you'd get much faster from an ADSL2+ package.

That site is giving download speeds anyway and they depend on the ISP as much if not more than your line.

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That speedtest site is useless. I just checked my home line and get...
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results/id/1... (13.2Mbps)
A test on that site straight after says 2.8Mbps one I did before the TBB test was 1.2Mbps

Edited by kwikbreaks (Wed 24-Mar-10 11:33:11)

In reply to a post by aneng:

I do get a fairly decent speed (5 to 7Mb) considering my location.

What accounts for the variation?

Is it over time? In which case it's caused by congestion in your ISP's network or BT's.

Or is it over wireless? In which case it has nothing to do with your exchange or your ISP.

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

That speedtest site is useless.

Not for me! Get the same D/L speed at that Top-10-Broadband site as I do at TBB.

I'll try again then - maybe I just caught it while it was taking a nap.

===

Ah - I think I've sussed it - the test is Flash based and the box at home I'm accessing to run the test is a very low power one (an EEE PC B202 so effectively a netbook) which I mostly use as a server for weather satellite recording amongst other stuff. It was marginally slower on TBB than I expected and when I tried it just now on the Top BB test it hardly registered. It was processing a satellite image. The Top BB speedtest requires a significant amount of processor power to run and that machine simply doesn't have it. Checking again now it has finished processing the satellite pass it peaks at 90% cpu just running the speed test !!!

I'll give it another go on a different machine when I get home.