Seeing Walters sig made me try out the speed rating thing at http://www.speedtest.net
Just over half what I’m paying for and I’ll only lose a smidgin by downgrading to 10Mb.
Hmmm
:chin:
Anyone on VirginMedia got a better speed ?
always take these with a pinch of salt… and ideally test from multiple sites at various times of day / days of week.
I know I can get about 16meg over my adsl2+ but these sites rarely report more than 12 for my connection.
Just something to be aware of 
That speed test picks the geographically closest test point to you by default. I find I get faster speeds if I pick one in London since pretty much everything goes there at some point. When I was on the 20 meg service, it usually tops out that test around 18. Having said that I have downgraded to the 10 meg and for normal use don’t notice any difference. Only time I do is if I’m doing a big upload where the reduced uplink speed is more noticeable.
A quick pair of results for comparison:
I picked one in Dublin and it was slightly faster 
This is actually much slower then usually. Beats me why. download norm is mid 30’s
speedtests are c4ap … there was some review actually done by virgin and it showed how inaccurate some of the test sites were and one could not even guage a 10meg connection but did perfectly with a 20meg one.
I’ll have too see if I can find it again.
Be interested in reading that, for the most part I go by comp apps.
BTW you were #4… Well your like a piece of the furniture then… Anybody been giving you a regular dusting off:D
No but then again all that dust is like an extra layer of thermal insulation
its Keeps me warm lol.
Can’t find it but this is a link on the UK’s BBC website that gives the gist…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7669713.stm
I have to be honest I do poorly in Speedtest, but my download speeds on some sites prove my connection is good.
I always say contention ratio / the computers that make up the highway so to speak to your destination and the speed of the connection of the sever on the other end all make up a variable that is variable from website to website and traffic loading kind of make speeds not worth measuring via speedtests.
I can run a speed test and get a couple of meg at most on an 8meg connection but connect say to a university or high site on a high speed network I will get about eqiv. to a 6 meg connection.
So I gave up running speedtests long ago.
i.e… 
The internet at the end of the day is bottlenecked, your connection maybe be great but its every other connection in the wouldwidenetwork that messes up all the stats and ability to clearly say what you can or cannot get.
and just to prove my point 
here’s using a speedtest over the pond in the USA
Well I dont donload much these days but it would be nice to get something like a CD download if a Linux ISO at anything more than 6Meg/second.
The speed tests tell one story but hands on usage says its slower than the speed test shows
Rates my 50mb connection as 7mb, but strangely I can download quite happily at 4.5Mb/s.
So I’d agree the rating sites are carp (even the site Virgin gives you to test 50mb is carp)
G
That’s a 100/100 line…
tried another server…
hmmmm lol
I’d far rather there be a site for decent latency tests, aka tcptrace rather than just crappy icmp stuff thats generally ignored or low priority traffic