It meant that we have told Virgin Media about seeing congestion problems on at least one peering link for over a year

Doesn't surprise me. My 50Mbps went right down the tubes to sometimes only deliver 5Mbps shortly after they started selling the ridiculous 100/10 unlimited on local pipes of 200/18 total capacity for 200+ users. When I complained I was given a fix date several months away so I downgraded to 10Mbps and resolved to leave at the earliest opportunity. That's now and as soon as my Infinity is up and running VM will be cancelled and I'll never be tempted by their marketing hype ever again. When they're good they're very very good but when they are bad (which is quite widespread now) they are horrid.

TBB's speedtest is consistently slow / incorrect. You are best doing what the majority of the world does, ignoring it and/or considering it irrelevant.

I was upgraded via the Superhub [ and a very nice Virgin technician ] on Wednesday to 60Meg

He left after my first TBB Test on Wed. which showed above 40 . Later that day and on Thursday tests were showing 55Meg up and 2.8 down

Since then TBB has rarely gone above 20 but Speedtest.net has varied enormously anything from 15 to 60 , uploads are consistently 2.8

It is rare that I get a bad speed test from TBB. It seems to affect higher rate users from what I've seen.

I went from 10Mb to 20Mb a few weeks ago and I do regular tests, they are all similar to

In reply to a post by Roph:

TBB's speedtest is consistently slow / incorrect. You are best doing what the majority of the world does, ignoring it and/or considering it irrelevant.

If its slow on VM but works on other ISPs and company fast connections (ie, 500mbps+) then there is something wrong with VM. Congestion is likely.

My VM cable line has just been upgraded from 10 Mbps (in practice, 9.4 Mbps at quiet times) to 20 Mbps, with the same old Webstar modem, and speed test results have varied in form and number.

Whereas the TBB Flash test on the 10 Mbps line used to show downloads being 'flat', usually at 9.4 Mbps throughout the test, now the speedometer needle varies wildly from about 20 Mbps down to about 5 Mbps, averaging out at 13-14 Mbps.

Speedtest.net, however, shows the download speed fairly consistently being about 19-20 Mbps (probably a little too high). Download speed for both programs is 1.07-1.1 Mbps (what should it actually be?).

I've always warned myself off speedtest.net, which used to give ludicrous results like 34.4 Mbps download speed on the 10 Mbps line when I had the firewall in Kaspersky Internet Security enabled, but now it seems to be the more accurate/consistent measurement program.

You are bearing out what I have been saying for some long time.

I used to use both TBB test [ not the flash one] and Speedtest.net and found huge differences between them - TBB was always almost half the speed of Speedtest.net

Recently I upped to 60 Meg - first week both speed tests showed anything between 55 and 60 , then TBB dropped to about 20 or less while speediest.net continued to show me at 50 +

This last week TBB is again showing me at 50+ [ so is Speedtest.net ]

Don't understand it - but that's my experience.

Cable is into the house but thereafter I'm connected wirelessly

Same here, I just gave up on the TBB speedtest.

And as we have said if an an ISP wants to run one of its peering links hot/congested then that is their choice.