This article is virtually meaningless if it doesn't state the conditions under the tests are carried out.

FACT: the rate at which you receive data on a broadband connection is ultimately determined by the server or peer-2-peer connection you're downloading from.

Only a dedicated server network for testing download speeds can provide any reliable information on your network speed, MySpeed PC Light http://myspeed.visualware.com is a good service, though again they are only as good as their servers can keep up with demand. The more people start to use them, the more work their servers have to do, the slower data is served. You should also average over a number of trials to reduce stochastic effects, I doubt very much whether this was done here, anybody who went to any effort would be sure to mention it. Even more thorough would be to compare all the Internet speed testing services, since there are a number of them - you should never base all your results on just one diagnostic - to do so would be scientifically illiterate, giving rise to suspicions rather than reliable facts.

Reliably testing broadband speeds is not a simple black and white step.

In his report "Broadband Speeds Revealed" ( http://www.moneysupermarket.com/c/articles/broadband/broadband-speeds-revealed/ ) Rob Barnes states:

However, if you use sites such as BBC iPlayer to stream rather than download material, you won't be using up any of your download allowance.

What kind of nonsense is this?

ALL up- and down-loading counts towards your limit. So please take note when he says:

bear in mind it takes 600Mb (almost half a GB) to download an episode of Top Gear, and over 1GB to download a music concert, your download allowance could be used up very quickly.

CC

PS Since when has "600Mb" been "almost half a GB"?

Shame Be* arn't mentioned. I am with their 18mb package and I get excatly that. The router connects at 18mb but when I ran some speed tests it was only showing as a measly 8mb/s :( However since some firmware upgrades and using a cable instead of the wifi I was getting dead on 18mb/s.

Happy++;

P.s. Yeah I live pretty much accross the road from the exchange....:D

Thanks fnarrr --- I just couldn't resist posting with reference to Rob & the big grin, I am feeling very frivolous today.

Not that it matters. !!!

Hey Community..... Where is the article then. ?

Please help, all people can see is Rob's profile and his grin. !

A whole weekend to be left in this position is above and beyond the call of duty. : ---)

Can't seem to find a table giving the results of the tests but computer shopper magazine has just published it's own results of a similar test with 22000 respondants.

On upto 8 Mbit/s they have Be (not mentioned here) followed by O2 then Zen (not mentioned here) Sky, Nildram (not mentioned here) Orange (not mentioned here) Madasafish (not mentioned here) BT (not mentioned here) Freesdom2surf (not mentioned here) Plusnet (not mentioned here) Virgin (not mentioned here) then Talktalk which of course is mentioned here.

Perhaps a better guide will be when samknows.com publishes the results of his independent survey of many factors including download speeds, throttling, traffic shaping etc. conducted using modified routers dished out to members throughout the country.

You may be paying for fast broadband access but are you getting it? Moneysupermarket has carried out speed tests on the services provided by the main internet service providers, so how has your supplier fared? Rob Barnes investigates ....

Click here to read this article.