How fast is your broadband?

[Dave2002]

This week I met several people who said that they'd got high speed broadband which works. One said that he got up to over 50 Mbps, while he also said that he had a friend somewhere in the UK who was getting over 250 Mbps.

We are currently achieving about 18.5 Mbps download, and a tad over 4 Mbps upload - with a ping of 12 ms. A few years ago I'd have said that was good, but now it seems that some parts of the UK have leapfrogged - while there really are still parts sitting in th doldrums with pathetically low data rates.

What are you getting?

Speed test - http://www.speedtest.net/

[vinteuil]

.

... today in Shepherd's Bush, bt infinity, it seems to be ping 43 - download 39.79 - upload 9.33.

[french frank]

Ping 29 ns (no idea what that is)
Download 74.30 Mbps
Upload 18.62 Mbps

Also BT Infinity

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Ping 23ms (nor I)
Download 11.68Mbps
Upload 0.86Mbps

No idea if this is considerably better or worse than vinty's and frenchie's - and, until this precise moment, I wasn't worried in the slightest!

[jean]

Ping 24 (me neither)
Download 17.19
Upload 0.98

We weren't entirely happy because we've been having dropouts, and also couldn't get the iPlayer via the TV set. We didn't know if the two were connected, nd neither did Plusnet. They diagnosed a line fault and after exhaustive testing everything seems to be ok - except the iPlayer on the TV.

[jayne lee wilson]

Download 51.03 mbps / Upload 9.35 mbps..... on BT Infinity.

It's usually a very stable service as well.

[ahinton]

I'm lucky to get much above 8.5mb and there's no fibre option here...

[Dave2002]

Ping 29 ns (no idea what that is)
Download 74.30 Mbps
Upload 18.62 Mbps

Also BT Infinity

If that really is 29 ns that's pretty fast - near instantaneous.

In fact it's so fast I'd say it's impossible.

Ping is a measure of the time it takes for the system at the other end of the link to respond. The link below shows that it's really a measure of Round Trip Time (RTT) to a specified server. It's made up of transmission delays, buffering delays at intermediate routers, and the response delay at the destination server.

Assuming your measure of 29 ns was real (which I very much doubt) that would imply that the server is about 10 ft away or less from your router - appyling basic rules - 1ns is equivalent to 1 foot travelled at the speed of light (but I think that's not adjusted for the speed of light in a cable - which is about 2/3 that in a vacuum - so 14 ns each way approx would give 14 foot, then scale down for the speed of light adjustment. That's assuming no buffering or service response delays at all.

The point is that ping can be considered approximately as a sum of round trip communication time overhead, plus response time at the destination server. It is the latter which normally dominates, particularly for short distance communications, such as within the UK. The minimum possible ping for a server 1000 miles away is about 15 (measured in milli-seconds) but 100 miles away would be 1.5 (again milli-seconds) - with the excess being due to the turn round at the server plus some network buffering delays.

I think there is an added confusion (possibly) due to change in the measurements used. Some sources say that ping is measured in micro seconds - but the tools actually return a value in milli seconds, which makes more sense. 100 ms is 1/10 of a second. I think this is because one of the Unix utility programs which used to be used to measure the RTT really did work in micro-seconds.

I think the article linked to below, which is not (otherwise) bad, is out by a factor of a 1000 when referring to a ping of 79, or is at least slightly misleading. The abbreviation for microseconds is μs (Greek mu seconds).

http://www.tested.com/forums/pc-and-mac/14211-how-does-internet-ping-work-and-is-a-ping-of-79-good/

The RTT is usually measured in microseconds. So if you have a ping of 79 on speedtest.net that means for whatever server you were testing against it took an average of 79 ms for a packet to reach it and be sent back.

79ms is 79000 microseconds.

If you try to play games with someone based in California, then the transmission time will be significant, and I would expect the RTT to be at least 70 milliseconds, and in practice longer than that because of buffering delays in intermediate routers. For long distance communications the propagation delays may dominate other factors.

[vinteuil]

.

... today in Shepherd's Bush, bt infinity, it seems to be ping 43 - download 39.79 - upload 9.33.

.


... at 6 pm =

ping 18 : download 51.08 : upload 8.47

[HighlandDougie]

Oh, I can but look longingly at the speeds you all seem to be getting. Living in (two) essentially rural areas, I'm lucky if my download ever exceeds 6mbps (in Scotland) and, wait for it, 2 mbps in France. Weirdly, upload in France is almost as fast as download (I did once convince a France Telecom person to increase the download "débit" to 22 mbps but it was deemed to be "destabilising" so it went back to 2 mbps sharpish). The Council here in France has at least decided that rural areas should not be disadvantaged so there is a roll-out this year of fibre to various areas, including, I hope, the village in which I live. Scotland remains intractable, I fear. But, at the end of the day, I don't feel that faster broadband is a good reason to swap clean air, a garden full of interesting birds, lovely views and great neighbours for life back in the city.

[robk]

Ping 18 / Download 166.14 mbps / Upload 12.70 mbps..... on Virgin Broadband.

[gradus]

d/l 6.5
u/l .35
lat 75-100
These are good for our village. No sign of any upgrade from BT.

[Petrushka]

Ping 20ms
Download 14.89 mbps
Upload 0.82 mbps

[Old Grumpy]

Download 33.6MBps
Upload 2.8MBps
Ping - not stated

[french frank]

If that really is 29 ns that's pretty fast - near instantaneous.

Microseconds rather than nanoseconds - typo . Otherwise, this evening: