cable forums speed test?

[kesterwww]

Hi all,
I have a question about the speed test which is on this site. When I do the test, it usually gives my average speed at around 6 meg. However, this is a lot different to results I get when I do a test on other sites.
On the VM web site, they recently did an article on the best speed tests;
http://www.virginmedia.com/customers/speedtesters/
Which claim that not all speed tests can acurately measure cable broadband. So what's the score? Is the test on this site more honest? Do the tests recommended by VM purposely flatter VM customers?
By the way, I pay for 10mb bb.

[Kymmy]

No speed test is 100 accurate and should only ever be used as a guide.. So many different factors can change the results such as distance, ping, latency and also bottlenecks..

Best way of checking your speed is multiple concurrent connections/downloads to a decent source (either a premium news server or as VM used to recommend thier own FTP site wihich has a few large game demo files on there)

[broadbandking]

Try downloading from gamefiles.blueyonder.co.uk

[Paul]

The speedtest here is reasonably accurate (on connections up to 20M) and also runs entirely on the VM network, so no non VM connectivity is involved (which can affect results). I dont have the ability to test it on 50M.