How fast can your ISP go ?

[old Bill]

Found this on the Thinkbroadband website. It makes intresting reading
Visitors to thinkbroadband.com have used our speed test tool in massive numbers, and in the course of the last four months many hundreds of thousands of speed tests have taken place, giving us an almost unique insight into the differences in speed between service providers. Averaging out the speeds for the 365,000 samples recorded between 6pm and 10pm we arrive at an average download speed of 2079 Kbps (2.03 Mbps).

The speed tests below show the average for tests carried out between 6pm and 10pm for each service provider where over 500 tests were carried out in this peak period. Tests are from a four month period covering the start of October 2006 through to the end of January 2007 and the results are shown in alphabetical order.

IMPORTANT NOTE: These results are an indication of the relative markets of the broadband service providers in question and do not reflect performance of specific services you may subscribe to. As such, a broadband provider with more customers on low speed services will have a lower average than those offering more high speed services, irrespective of the quality of service, or speed-to-price ratio. As such, this is NOT A LEAGUE TABLE of broadband providers and should not be referenced as such.


Provider
Download speed
Provider
Download speed
AOL UK   1,687 Kbps   Be   7,576 Kbps
Biscit   1,484 Kbps   BT Total   2,065 Kbps
Bulldog   3,148 Kbps   Demon   1,716 Kbps
Eclipse   1,583 Kbps   Entanet   2,157 Kbps
Freedom2Surf   2,111 Kbps   Griffin   2,392 Kbps
Homechoice   2,609 Kbps   IDnet   2,515 Kbps
Karoo   1,854 Kbps   Madasafish   2,320 Kbps
Metronet   1,480 Kbps   Mistral   1,242 Kbps
Namesco   1,723 Kbps   NewNet   2,205 Kbps
Nildram   2,532 Kbps   Orange   1,072 Kbps
Pipex   1,136 Kbps   Plusnet   2,017 Kbps
Prodigy   1,644 Kbps   Sky   3,340 Kbps
Supanet   1,866 Kbps   Talk Talk   1,225 Kbps
Tiscali   1,470 Kbps   UK Online   3,106 Kbps
Virgin Media (cable)   2,978 Kbps   Virgin Media (non-cable)   858Kbps
Zen Internet   2,564 Kbps       

[AvengerUK]

Yea, i read this article yesterday. Notice that IDnet is among the highest (Minus those with "Silly speed" services ) and virgin ADSL...ouch!

[Rik]

The problem with those figures is that they fall into the lies, damned lies and statistics category.

First, the sample is based on people who speed test during a 4-hour period of the day. OK, it's the peak period, but it's a time I'm not online and wouldn't speed test if I were (I prefer 5am to get a better idea on what my line can do at its best).

Second, it takes no account of the quality of lines involved. An ISP may have a large percentage of customers with very good or very bad lines. That's not something the ISP can influence, so the result may reflect well or badly on an ISP regardless of the ISP's network performance.

What would have been more interesting is if they had also done an analysis of speeds using the old BT tester, which took the ISP out of the equation, and included those results.

[Philip]

mines going fairly fast