download speeds

sorry in advance for the novice computer question, but our download speed at home is supposed to be 'up to' (ha ha) 20Mb/s on the O2 pro thing.
however, our measured download speed, by some on line measuring thing, was 0.5mb/s, and upload speed was 425kb/s or something.
pretty rubbish, anyway, and not enough to watch I player, unless you mind watching it at [2 words /5 secs re load/ 2 words] etc.
is there anything we can do?
we were on madasafish before, which was still pretty rubbish, but i'm sure it was better than this. we could actually watch the occasional program most of the time.

I see BT Total Broadband do a free broadband accellerator, with their package, but it isn't guarenteed to make any difference.
Is this a load of marketing codswallop aimed at people like me?

Are we just doomed BB customers, linked to the world on the end of some dodgey bit of bell wire that traipses through the trees in cornwall, or is there hope?

cheers.

you will have a problem with your cottage being up in the middle of nowhere.

There's a lot more to it than attenuation and distance. You need to take into account capacitance values, number of jumpers/joins in the copper, distance from the PCP, drop point, etc, how old the cabling is, how many pairs in the wire, crosstalk, environmental factors such as weather, temperature, background electrical interference etc.

Basically, it's far from an exact science and at the absolute best you can hazard a wild guess. To provide you with 'broadband' you only need to be able to consistently achieve a 64kilobits per second physical connection rate, there is no guaranteed minimum throughput.

spot on, thanks everyone.
Right.........

opus jody wrote: Wrighty wrote: The free broadband accelerator is a little box (also known as the iPlate) which slots into your BT master socket, isolating the ring wire, to reduce RF pickup. If you've already got a filtered master socket (big sticky-outy plate with ADSL 1.0 on it), it won't make a difference. You can buy them (and get more info on them) here:http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/Shop/ShopDetail.asp?ProductID=8138 Is this different from the little thing with 'ADSL FILTER' written on it, that plugs into the phone socket, and has the phone & the router plugged into it?

Yes, but all it does is cut the bell wire, which you can do yourself with a pair of snips and a screwdriver in about ten seconds. 90% of houses don't even have a bell wire though.

basically, the speeds ISPs advertise are bulldoggy poo (lol @ wordfilter) for all but a few lucky people... apparently something is going to be done about this and they'll have to be more truthful in future, but don't quote me on that...

I can see the exchange out the window but until they upgraded the line the other day I was getting around 80kb/s (instead of 8mb/s as advertised) whatever they've done it's loads faster now (but not flat out 8mb/s fast...)


Edited by Corticyte - 16 November 2009 at 11:10pm