Broadband speed in the UK
 

I expect most members already know but this is a reminder that over 99% of telephone exchanges in the UK have now been upgraded to 8mbit capability. My ISP allows a regrade of my 2mbit line for a one off payment of £5 (monthly fee stays the same). The exact speed you get is down to how far you are from the exchange and line quality. I have been switched today and am now getting 5.6 mbit (wow -big differance from 2mbit). It is worth checking you ISP for a regrade.

I use NTL cable and currently subscribe to a 1MBit/s service. I do know a chap who uses NTL's 10Mbit/s and he claims he gets around 6Mbit/s. Overall bit rate depends upon the far server and all routers etc along the way subject to lowest common denominator.

I used to pay £37.99 for 3Mbit/s and now use greater speed as a saving rather than performance, 1Mbit/s costs £17.99 and is perfectly acceptable.

For info Stephen, I pay £14.99 for my now 5.6Mbit/s line.

As Stephen says, even with my 2mb connection I find I'm still restricted by speeds at the other end of the equation sometimes. Depends what and where you're downloading from.

I think the bigger benefit of upgrading is send speeds... you can get less than 15% of what is quoted.

I am within 500yrds of an exchange, so I look forward to 8mb for sending big photos off to print.

Now, thats where ASDL falls over with its limitation of 256kbit/s upload speed. Cable modems run at whatever they are instructed to and technically possible to send and receive upto 18Mbit/s. Cable modems pulse providing the subscribed average speed. However my 1Mbit/s service has a pathetic 100kbit/s upload but I save £20 each month compared to NTL's finest.

I am now getting 399 Kbps upload with my new connection according to the line speed test. Previous to my upgrade I was getting around half of this. Also the download speed increase from 2 Mbit/s to 5.6 Mbit/s is very noticable, esp on birdforum.net. As a lot of ISP's will allow a regrade with no extra cost per month it is crazy not to go for this faster speed.

BT's ADSL Max can offer send speeds at over 800kbps, though for normal 'joe public' it'll be 400kbps.

I just found this on the web, gives quite detailed info on your local exchange
http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/

Sounds great but now add monthly PSTN line rental. From memory approx £8.50 per month making a sole ASDL service £23.50. However Mbit/s for £ its a very good deal. Does this service come with equipment such as USB ASDL modem or a real ADSL router?

Hi Stephen, We are not all dummies out here - for info I am a recently retired IT manager who set-up and ran a thin client network over five locations with over 100 users (recently upgrading the leased lines to ADSL) so please give me a tiny bit of credit for knowing what I am doing. And by the way I am with a 'real' ISP not Wanadoo,Tiscali or BT for instance. My intial posting was to remind people using a BT line that they could now get up to 4 times the speed if ther require, very often for no more monthly fee, I am begining to regret even making the post with all the negativity flying around.

I am not sure what is meant by negativity, I point out 5-6MBit/s is normal for high speed lines and compare costs from other providers. The post is welcome and informative. I setup and recommend ADSL for use with CCTV systems and believe me, 400 - 800kbit/s upload speed will really make a difference. I am seriously considering dumping NTL in favour for ASDL with performance v's cost of this. Could you provide details so myself and others can take advantage of this.