Your broadband download speeds?

Enzyme

Enzyme

Bronze Level Poster
Just moved into a new flat and ordered TalkTalk broadband as its pretty cheap and my mums on it..had no problems with it whatsoever. Anyway, the site is saying i will average 4.8mbps, with a highest of 6.6 and a lowest of 2.2..which is what my phone line can 'handle'. So may i ask, are these speeds decent for gaming online and downloads as such..anyone on a similar connection?

Thanks.
 
Rack

Rack

Enthusiast
I don't know how much help this will be, but when we had a 4mb download speed with sky, we were downloading things at about 500kb/s (not great I know). Online gaming was alright, but when also listening to music etc on YouTube, or streaming via Iplayer, the games started to lag a lot. Hope this helps

Rack
 
steaky360

steaky360

Moderator
Moderator
I don't know offhand what my connection speed is (I'm currently away from home and cannot check either unfortunately) but I am with Talk Talk and do not have any problems with gaming or downloading.
I also live outside of Aberdeen in Scotland so no fiber or anything like that up this way yet.
 
Jack Guinea

Jack Guinea

Bright Spark
On my speed test it says that my download speed is 5 MB/s and yet when i download games it does so at 630kb/s. Online its good as i never get any lagg but when downloading games YouTube takes ages to buffer and online gaming starts to lagg.
 
Wolvo7

Wolvo7

Bright Spark
Jack Guinea said:
On my speed test it says that my download speed is 5 MB/s and yet when i download games it does so at 630kb/s. Online its good as i never get any lagg but when downloading games YouTube takes ages to buffer and online gaming starts to lagg.
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What's your broadband package? I suspect that the speed test indicates that your speed is 5 Mbps (Megabits/s) whereas your download speed is indicated in MB/s (Megabytes/s). Since 1 byte = 8 bits, that would make sense since 630 KB/s = 5.04 Mbps.
 
Wolvo7

Wolvo7

Bright Spark
What's your provider then? Here again it's 30 Mbps, I wish that we could reach speeds of 30 MB/s :)
 
W

Wozza63

Biblical Poster
The actual download speeds are not really that important, its all about the ping, and for optimal gaming, you want lower than 50ms, and other downloas will make your ping worse

My download speeds arent great atm, but my ping is 18ms XD
 
A

Adli

Enthusiast
no idea.

under the Network And Sharing Center, it says our speed is 65mbps (just over 8 MBps) but all the speedtests i do get 0.8 MBps on average, with the peak download rate (on steam) being 1.2 MBps once, one minute. im not sure if our connection sucks, or if our package isn't actually that fast to begin with.
 
Wolvo7

Wolvo7

Bright Spark
Adli said:
no idea.

under the Network And Sharing Center, it says our speed is 65mbps (just over 8 MBps) but all the speedtests i do get 0.8 MBps on average, with the peak download rate (on steam) being 1.2 MBps once, one minute. im not sure if our connection sucks, or if our package isn't actually that fast to begin with.
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That's odd. I'm guessing you're with Virgin Media, may be worth contacting them if you always get these speeds cuz that's about the same as what i get with a 20 Mbps package.
 
A

Adli

Enthusiast
Wolvo7 said:
That's odd. I'm guessing you're with Virgin Media, may be worth contacting them if you always get these speeds cuz that's about the same as what i get with a 20 Mbps package.
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BT Broadband. we're getting an independent engineer out to check the connections and lines first. if we find it is BTs fault we'll yell at BT :)
 
Wolvo7

Wolvo7

Bright Spark
Didn't even know that BT had optic fiber :) They should make packages without a phone line if they want to compete with Virgin since you don't need one with the optic fiber.
 
A

Adli

Enthusiast
Wolvo7 said:
Didn't even know that BT had optic fiber :) They should make packages without a phone line if they want to compete with Virgin since you don't need one with the optic fiber.
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its not fiber, thats why the 65mbps my laptop says is kinda wierd. the nearest package i can find on the BT website is 16mbps, which makes more sense but is still double what our speed is atm.
 
MrWillis

MrWillis

Member
I'm on *cough* 10mbps with Virgin Media and haven't changed it since 10mbps was the fastest broadband. I did an online speed test and I actually get about 2mbps, download speeds usually peak at around 1.5mbps unless someone else is using bandwidth in which case it drops to around 500kbps. For gaming it's fine but downloading it's awful, especially when most people I know are running at 60mbps.

Ahh the joys of living under your anti-tech parents' roof...
 
Wolvo7

Wolvo7

Bright Spark
Wolvo7

Wolvo7

Bright Spark
MrWillis said:
I'm on *cough* 10mbps with Virgin Media and haven't changed it since 10mbps was the fastest broadband. I did an online speed test and I actually get about 2mbps, download speeds usually peak at around 1.5mbps unless someone else is using bandwidth in which case it drops to around 500kbps. For gaming it's fine but downloading it's awful, especially when most people I know are running at 60mbps.

Ahh the joys of living under your anti-tech parents' roof...
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Virgin don't even offer 10 Mbps packages anymore, the min is 30 :) You could ask your parents to have a look, you might be paying almost the same price as the 30 Mbps one while getting 1/3 of the speed.

Again it's a question of Mbps vs MBps. Everything that you download is expressed in bytes (B) whereas connection speeds are expressed in bits (b). Since 1 Byte = 8 bits you're looking at expected speeds of 10/8 = 1.25 MB/s when downloading stuff, which is consistent with what you're getting. Actually 1.5-2 MB/s is pretty good.

You wouldn't even get DL speeds of 10 MB/s with a 60 Mbps package :)
 
A

Adli

Enthusiast
Wolvo7

Wolvo7

Bright Spark
Adli said:
we dont have fiber optic though, Infinity isn't available in our area. we have unlimited BBand, but the nearest package than isn't Fiber is 16mbps not 65mbps. thats why the reading on my laptop is confusing :p
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Oh I know what you mean lol my laptop did the same thing when I was with O2 I had the 20 Mbps package but my Network and Sharing center indicated that my speed was 100 Mbps :p

I guess you have the 16Mbps package then, you can just double-check which one you've got on your BT account. :)
 
A

Adli

Enthusiast
Wolvo7 said:
Oh I know what you mean lol my PC did the same thing when I was with O2 I had the 20 Mbps package but my Network and Sharing center indicated that my speed was 100 Mbps :p

I guess you have the 16Mbps package then, you can just double-check which one you've got on your BT account. :)
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ok that's good, were only at 1/2 speed then, instead of 1/7 :p
 
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