How many Mbps please: how fast is your broadband in B29?
posted by pindec
Is B29 a slow broadband area? According to the BBC, the government may miss its 2012 target to give every household in the UK access to 2 Mbps broadband, and some Virgin users in the area are reporting speed issues of their own.
There is a telephone exchange in Oakfield Road (B29 7HW), and according to the BBC report then any house within 4km *should* be able to get at least 2 Mbps.
I thought it would be interesting for us all to report our true broadband speeds, and see how much it differs between providers. Those of you using BT lines can use the BT speed checker, otherwise try the Broadband Speed Checker, or take a look at the speeds your modem reports directly from its config/admin pages.
That way, if your speed is much worse than people close by with the same mode of access (i.e. cable or broadband), you should definitely recheck all the internal factors that affect broadband speed - see this handy guide. Even if you can't find an in-house fault like a rogue phone socket without a microfilter, it's also worth googling around to check your hardware/ISP compatibility - we had a NetGear wireless router that turned out to be incompatible with TalkTalk (our cheap but pretty sucky ISP - their customer service is laughably awful).
In First Avenue, with broadband over a BT line, I get approx. 6.3 Mbps download speed according to the Broadband Speed Checker service (that's fixed cable - over my Wi-Fi it's more like 2.3). I could in theory improve this by switching providers, as we're less than 1km from the Selly Oak telephone exchange and we're in a cable area. According to the excellent Sam Knows site, there are 6 other local broadband providers from the Selly Oak exchange I can consider (plus additional secondary sellers not listed).
How fast are you? Any broadband recommendations for B29 (on price and on customer service)?
There is a telephone exchange in Oakfield Road (B29 7HW), and according to the BBC report then any house within 4km *should* be able to get at least 2 Mbps.
I thought it would be interesting for us all to report our true broadband speeds, and see how much it differs between providers. Those of you using BT lines can use the BT speed checker, otherwise try the Broadband Speed Checker, or take a look at the speeds your modem reports directly from its config/admin pages.
That way, if your speed is much worse than people close by with the same mode of access (i.e. cable or broadband), you should definitely recheck all the internal factors that affect broadband speed - see this handy guide. Even if you can't find an in-house fault like a rogue phone socket without a microfilter, it's also worth googling around to check your hardware/ISP compatibility - we had a NetGear wireless router that turned out to be incompatible with TalkTalk (our cheap but pretty sucky ISP - their customer service is laughably awful).
In First Avenue, with broadband over a BT line, I get approx. 6.3 Mbps download speed according to the Broadband Speed Checker service (that's fixed cable - over my Wi-Fi it's more like 2.3). I could in theory improve this by switching providers, as we're less than 1km from the Selly Oak telephone exchange and we're in a cable area. According to the excellent Sam Knows site, there are 6 other local broadband providers from the Selly Oak exchange I can consider (plus additional secondary sellers not listed).
How fast are you? Any broadband recommendations for B29 (on price and on customer service)?
B29 Links
1 Comments:
At 9:43 pm, June 04, 2009 ,
Michael Grimes said...
I'm getting 967kbps over ethernet on a BT line. Don't know whether that's fast or slow though, because I can't remember what it's supposed to be.
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