[Dave]

A few sites that will help you investigate actual broadband speeds you are getting :-

InternetFrog.com: Network Tools, Internet Speed Test and Website Tools

ADSLguide: Broadband Speed Test

& lastly the site you have to use for ISP's to work with BT on any speed issues:-

Test Result

[Rob Barron]

Very interesting but I have to say it gave results I expected: totally different every time, totally different to each other and speeds that bear little relationship to those I generally experience. I think this might have something to do with my using cable rather than a BT telephone line, obviously couldn't do the last test.

I realise that there will always be variations even when doing something a few seconds later but the reality is when downloading a file of any significant size I get a very stable download speed indeed: usually about 240Kbs/sec. I regularly download files of about 5 Mbs which usually take about 22 seconds give or take. According to the InternetFrog system, it should be taking anywhere between 2 minutes and 5 minutes according to their charts.

Upload speeds ar notoriously variable, much more so than the download speeds but they are fast enough for me not to worry as I am not usually called upon to upload 50Mbs of files! I don't worry about downloading even 100MBs as that still only takes about 7-8 minutes.

People with far more technical experience will tell me that I am not getting the figures I think I'm getting and stuff but frankly, I am not interested in the figures of bits and bytes but I am interested in the time of the whole file and that is always or at least usually very good indeed compared to the bad old days of dial up :o)

Anyone else getting large variations when you run these tests and how do they compare to your own experiences? I am intrigued to know.

Cheers,
Rob