Broadband Speedtesters still misleading consumers

[joglynne]

Virgin Media today released the results of its latest evaluation of web-based speedtests which show that consumers are still being misled by inaccurate results and reports based on unsubstantiated data.

No doubt the BB geeks will have read it all before but, as a pretty average Joe (:D) BB user, I found this VM Press Release and the chart it includes interesting.

http://pressoffice.virginmedia.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=205406&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1265081&highlight=

[Magilla]

Tho still nowhere near the level that VM mislead their own customers.

[Welshchris]

LMAO at those results. Only a few days ago a member of the Chief Execs office and also their tech support was telling me DONT! use Speedtest.net London server at any time because its unreliable for 20mb and 50mb users.

MAKE UR MIND UP VIRGIN!

[broadbandking]

I like speedtest.net I always get good results from that one, London always gives me the best results tho and it isnt the yellow prymid

[zing_deleted]

my feelings on speedtests are all over this forum they are not worth the bandwidth you waste running them

for example this forums own speed test says I get 6 meg funnily enough Newsbin and astraweb say I am getting my 20 go figure lol and I am guessing astrawebs european cluster is further away too lol

There is a little reg hack that increases your max connection per servr which could help with http downloads though

[leexgx]

speedtest web sites are good for adsl lines as thay are norm slow but on above 10mb services speedtest websites need to be doing 30-50mb testfiles as some speedtest websites are 1-5mb files (50mb bb is 6MB/s peak) so tests can not be shown correctly

other way to do is just download from 5-6 fast sites and look at an local bandwidth monitor, if your useing IE6-8 get IE7pro plugin as it has an download manager that default is 8 connections to the server your downloading from (on virgin you want to set to that to 10) i tent to get what ever the server can give (that i am downloading from)

[Ignitionnet]

Don't remember my old ADSL at 21Mbit being slow but that's another story. Think Broadband have a great speedtest system and it's certainly passed all the Virgin tests.

This forum's speed test isn't really viable at anything like 20Mbit due to its' file size and TCP slow start.

[leexgx]

on avg most adsl users get around 2-4mb bb

[chickendippers]

This forum's speed test isn't really viable at anything like 20Mbit due to its' file size and TCP slow start.
It's pretty old and was designed back in the days of 700Kb :)

[joglynne]

I don't test my speeds very often as I have no reason to do so but when my connection seems cloggy I do I use Thinkbroadband and do so using their download test files.

Slightly off topic but still with Thinkbroadband I am currently trying to use their "handy" bandwidth meter and am struggling to understand what the results I am getting mean about my BB usage but that's something that will mean a new thread, which will undoubtedly go over my head, ....... again,..........as usual. <sigh>

[nutellajunkie]

bbmax's clock me in at over 60mb.. im on 10.. Go figure LOL

[Ignitionnet]

on avg most adsl users get around 2-4mb bb

It's a touch over 4, and on average according to the stats 20Mbit VM customers get sub-10Mbit. Worth mentioning that O2/Be customers average considerably more than 2-4Mbit over DSL, so you should probably be a touch more specific with your generalisation. O2/Be's top tier actually gives similar performance to VM's 20Mbit downstream and wipes its' backside on it upstream. Oh and stats are evil ;)

---------- Post added at 18:57 ---------- Previous post was at 18:54 ----------

bbmax's clock me in at over 60mb.. im on 10.. Go figure LOL

You are probably on wireless which can mess with the results nicely otherwise there was a huge stall in the TCP transfer due to WAN issues. There all figured :)

[General Maximus]

I am gladh they have updated it so quickly. I had 50mbit installed last week and the enginner who came round was cacking his pants because he had just been someone else's house to install 50mbit and he said he could only get 26 mbit. We set mine up and ran the speed test from the official VM 50mbit test servers and I only got 26mbit as well. Luckily I told him not to panick and i would run one from the Maidenhead server on speedtest.net and it gave me 47mbit, same for the London one as well. A couple of hours later a customer service dude gave me a ring to make sure everything was hunky dorry and explained to him what had happened and he said as far as VM are concerned speedtest.net doesnt support 50mbit speed test but he would feed it back to the tech guys. I am glad they have responded to quickly because if their engineers are only running tests off their VM servers (whatever the problem is) as far as they are concerned peops are only getting half their speed and they are wasting time and money by escalating a fault that doesn't exist.