The Gadget Show on C5 is having a go at ISPs who provide much slower connections than their advertising suggests.  You too can take part and measure your current speed at

http://gadgetshow.five.tv/jsp/speed_test.htm

They did this to death last series, only that time "The Bald One" was campaigning for 'Free Broadband" for everyone.

I'm afraid I see this as much the same, and is little more than the product of an idle mind or two at the Production Meeting, and someone realising that speedtest provided free widgets to allow their test to be installed on any web site, an it fills 5 minutes of air time, without achieving anything.

Hmmm... Perhaps it does, and has the ISPs wasting time dealing with pointless emails generated as a result of people who don't understand the concept of 50:1 contention ratios, and start complaining about their 2mb connection only being 1,9mb. The ISPs have to spend more money on support staff and less on beefing up the hardware, and to top it all off, everyone forgets that the main limiting factor is not (generally) down to the ISP, but the quality of the wiring to your house, and the equipment in your local exchange, both of which are probably owned and maintained by BT, and leased by the ISP. Ah, but I'm forgetting that bald TV geeks with silly designer glasses know best.

Here's the real test site...

http://speedtest.net/

I'm still waiting for The Gadget Show's test to start, but will have to go and lie down soon!

Here's my typical result, for an 'Up to 2mb' service...



Oh, fair enough campaign to run though, if a little misguided, since if no-one moans, now that broadband is available by various means over most of the country, motivation for improvement is no bad thing.

The problem is though, that 'commercial' services are eating into the bandwidth, and you may have seen a recent item regarding the BBC, who are now (as are others) providing their broadcast content over the internet. This is 'free', but the provision of video gobbles up bandwidth (again, "The Bald One" failed to mention this as a major cause of slowness), and there are moves to move programmed suppliers like the BBC onto slower, but free, connections, giving them the option to pay for faster premium connections if they wish to push their programmes out on the net using up more bandwidth for higher quality images.

That's very good for 2mb - are you cable or phoneline broadband Captain?

He of the 'Shiny but Possibly Defective Dome' called for complaints again both cable and phone based suppliers, but these are different technologies, and cable will usually far outstrip phone bases systems, with higher speeds being the norm.

My own (phone) usually hovers around an average of 1.7mb, and I've seen it as low as 1.2mb, but that is unusual.

Not being a consumer of, or video addict, I'm generally happy, and would also be happy to see commercial operators such as the BBC/ITV/film distributors etc (who are all flush with massively huge profits)being penalised for throwing their output onto the web, and gobbling up all the capacity that was added to speed it up, and has been stolen by them as they are getting free use of capacity that was added when what they are doing was not conceived or included in the expansion plans.

Those of us who want to use it for info transfer, small web sites, a few images, email and the like are being pushed out by these high bandwidth, megabyte-hungry, profitable, corporate golden-eggs, and can do nothing to stop them.

Unfortunately, techno-geeks like Baldy from the Gadget Show get drunk on things like mobile TV/video/films/streaming media and the like, so instead of doing something about controlling them as they proliferate without regulation, turn round and start lobbing stones at the ISPs, who are actually the ones being robbed. The ISPs put in more capacity years ago, and now the BBC, and rubbish like YouTube, has done the equivalent of turning up at the buffet with a 10-ton lorry and cleared the table, while the guests look on and starve.

My speed varies quiet a bit.  At 4pm it was 970 and 243  but at 9pm it was down to 294 and 245 for what is supposed to be 1.1meg.  I am almost a mile from the exchange so do not expect the full monty.

It's the old 'Who Won The War' paradox.

If you are in an area where the existing cabling (dating from the days of Bell and Edison) is good enough to provide broadband, then you will get the service it can deliver. If you're lucky, the old stuff will carry the signal for a few miles, and you will get good bandwidth. If not, then you will get a low speed, or nothing at all if the cable is mince and needs to be replaced. That is why all the contracts carry statement to the effect that 'The promised service will only be delivered subject to satisfactory line test'.

Some time back around 2000 or so, someone in the Highlands filled in the order for an internet connection, and both they and BT signed the paperwork BEFORE the test was carried out. To cut a long story short, the upshot was that there was no cable infrastructure to support the service they had signed a contract to supply, so the lucky shopper got something like £25,000 of cabling laid for a the then standard installation fee of around £200.

If you're in an area where the cabling has been upgraded, then once the exchange has the equipment installed, there shouldn't be any issues.

Wee islands tend to do better than established locations because they will have had to be connected with new cabling and new equipment. In some cases, this even involved the installation of radio links. There was one case a while back where the broadband service kept failing at regular intervals throughout the day. Turns out part of the link crossed water by radio, and as the level rose and fell withe tide, the signal bouncing of the water would interfere with the main signal, cancelling it out until the level had passed the critical height.

A few years back, the distance that broadband was offered over was increased from the 3 miles or so mentioned, to 6 miles or so 'overnight' (and remember the test clause). This was nothing to do with the cabling, but was down to some spectacular developments in the kit that insets and extracts the broadband signal onto the phoneline.

As an example of there being no real logic, my area was amongst the last to even be able to get broadband - we had previously had to use ISDN for a measly 128kb (288kb would merely have doubled the cost) which cost a fortune! - and our exchange is less than 4 miles from Glasgow city centre, so the islands and remote areas were NOT being left out and ignored, and many whingeing Highlanders went broadband years ahead of many areas next to Glasgow.

At a mere mile from the exchange you SHOULD expect the full monty. I suspect you have many users sharing your 1.1mb - as a domestic user, you can be sharing that with anything up to 50 others (business users only have to share with 20 others), so if you have some neighbours that think it's 'KEWL' to get TV/video/film via the internet, then that is why your speed result is going up and down like that.

I'd have to say that I doubt your exchange will be bursting with spare capacity in the racks to allow the load to be spread, so YOU possibly are someone that should in fact be following the Gadget Show lead and doing the 'Shiny Headed One's' bidding, and getting that complain off to your ISP with the numbers to prove it's poor. Then they can cut you off completely as a troublemaker