How to get faster broadband

Looks like the goose has gotten fat!

I have been getting lousy service from my ISP since Christmas with only a couple of days of decent speed, and that was after I complained in January only for it to drop again.
I used the advice on your email and I cut a pasted some of that advice to my e-mail to my isp two days ago saying that the email was an official complaint and that as I was paying for 8mbps (the telephone line only accepts 5mbps) and using their own speed checker, I was getting 746kbps and that I found this was not acceptable and I quoted your info on controlling bodies etc. and within 2 hours I was getting 4.99mbps and even one burst of 5mbps and I have been getting similar since, thank you for the advice.

Your video is very nice but also very misleading. I know its a difficult subject and not one easily understood without decades of work in the field, something 99.9% of internet users don't have.

I'm not taking any side just adding some real info. When you're talking about internet speeds its not fair to blame your ISP for slow downloads (although a lot of ISP do deserve the negatives). When you connect to a website your not connecting to that website but potentially dozens of other computers run by many people before you get the web page you're looking for. To get a better idea, from windows click start, run, type cmd, click ok. now type "tracert www.google.com". Every "hop" you see is a computer your information is passing through to get to the site you want. If one of those is slow your overall experience is slow.

Real world info:

I have a 50Mb Virgin Media connection. Using tests I can confirm my connection from me to Virgin Media is 49.9 Mb. Great.

If I use the speed sites youve suggested, they show around 20 Mb connection speed. Not fair and not accurate as they are running their tests over the internet which could be effected by dozens of none relevant computers.

Further add to that if I do all this over wireless then my connection speed drops again to 17Mb. You will never get a very fast or full speed wireless connection unless you sit right next to your wireless router with nothing blocking line of sight and also remove anything within a 500 foot radius that uses the same frequency as your wireless router, so thats your house phone (DECT), your mobile phone, your wireless doorbell, your microwave, anything bluetooth, modern house alarms, car alarms, taxi and police radios......in short, you cant.

...and then the final point it took some testing and research after moving to 50Mb to discover that my home router was not capable of more than 15Mb maximum so I had to buy a new router. I am now aware that the new router has a maximum speed of 50Mb so when Virgin Media release their 100Mb and 200Mb service later this year I'll need a further upgrade.

So in short I would say a massive percentage of internet download speed issues lie at the end users feet.

(I am a Technical Specialist by trade and have decades of real world experience and training and have degrees in all things computers.....I know what I'm talking about :) )

The main problem we have is that he router is pretty appalling and despite numerous calls to our provider , they do not have any solution and we cannot buy a stronger independent router as the system has its own "protected id" so basically we are screwed. Not impressed as their advert states that"there is never any interruption even at peak times". The should be done under trading standards for that!

I was told to use ccleaner for free but they always want to charge me £1995

something i dont think has been mentioned here is that the quality of the actual cable in the ground has a lot to play in the speed achieved and the quality of service received. certain areas of the country have aluminium cabling installed when their was a copper shortage, speeds on this cabling will be appalling. if BT's original copper lines are in but their has been a lot of development or general digging in the area the cable can be damaged and service may drop off unexpectedly and the speeds will generally be lower, even virgin isnt immune to this as at one point they were using fibre in the streets but the connection from the street to the house was copper and therefore not able to accept the highest speeds. BT are slowly rolling out fibre across the country, but as I have recently seen a quote for a custom install to a business premises of this fibre of £7K for a 700metre run you can understand why this will take some time. the other side of the coin as well is do we really need these speeds in everyday life? i can stream online videos quite happily at 5meg, downloads are quick enough, and if you want more then you should pay more - the real problem here is one-upmanship, if every providor said "x speed is y pounds and if you want more then pay more" then we wouldnt have this argument!

Thank you for such an in depth comment.
I am glad to see that it is not all down to the IPS provider.
I am far from techie and do not use internet for games etc. but more for research interest and now for trying to run a home biz.
Part of that is gaining customers to save money by supplying all utilities , including broadband, and it is nice to be able to have a sensible, honest answer to a possible misleading statement about speed. Many thanks for these words of yours

How do find out how much money you can put in trusts when none co
say the amount i have looked at there home page and just can not find
any infomation do you have send for it
T/Y AL

The advice completed missed some major points. The majority of PC users do not dom basic housekeeping on their laptop/desktop because they don't no how to. Regular defragging the hard disk, removing junk files, defragging the registry, clearing the cache, removing all log on traces all these otems need to be done regularly. There are a number of excellent packages which will do all these housekeeping tasks at less than £30 per year.
It never fails to amase me that when I am asked to look at a PC which the owner claims is slow when connected to the internet to find that they have more than half a dozen applications running at thhe same time. The desktop looks as though it is suffering from measels, so many icons that is difficult to see how the user can differentiate between them. Each Icon can use between 1.5- 30K just sitting on the desktop. Fine if the PC has 4Gb of memory but a disaster for a slow machine with low memory. The other problem is the number of services which are running once the machine is booted up. Unless you use smartcards, dial-up modems or remote access regularly disable them.
Once the PC is properly optimised including optimising the network connection, then check the ISP line speed. You may well find that you will now be getting an improved connection speed as the PC is in a far healthier state. Finally remember that the internet speed is a function of traffic to and from the remote server as well as the condition of the line provided by the ISP. If you are logging on to a server to look at a sports item which attracts 1,000s of users, the bandwidth available will be less than the bandwidth used to provide a service with a lower population of users. Downloading to die for apps, music or films usually results in far lower available bandwidth.
Sometimes it is better and faster to use network dead time, i.e. if your downloading from a US server workout the time zone for the server and download when that part of the US are asleep, the difference is download speeds can sometimes be awesome.
Finally despite everything else the speed of the line in most areas depends upon the physical quality of the local loop between your house and the exchange. Some of the circuits thbat make up the local loop are more than 30 years old and may be acceptable for speech but introduce severe losses for data. I live in a village and the advertised speed from BT is 8Gb looking at average speeds over the last 30 days the actual line speed is 7.86GB. There is nothing BT can do to improve on this figure because of the distance I live from the local exchange. Once BT lay fibre optic then the situation will improve.

When are the SPs going to stop their sneeky advertising heavily implying that ''Meg'' refers to Megabytes when it is in fact megabits (incidentally this is one eight the speed of a Megabyte). They use the ''cool'' expression Meg to hide this very misleading approximation of broadband speed. Eg 24Meg is in fact 3 Megabytes - 24 megabits!! It is an outrage.(!)

None of the above seem to be as bad as Broadband speed in Higher Heath in North Shropshire which is 0.8 (properly tested)!! Dark ages? It takes literally days to download anything large.