Cable Forum - View Single Post

laurenced · 12-09-2008, 16:30

Hi all

After being a VM cable customer for a year in my previous flat (4mb > 10mb) and being very happy with it, I decided to upgrade to 20meg when moving into a new place.

Although it's far from slow, it's certainly not 20meg. I've been using the speedtester at http://speedtest.bbmax.co.uk. Now I know these things are never totally accurate, but in my last flat (which is just 5 mins down the road) I would get the proper readings for both my 4meg connection and latterly my 10meg connection when it was upgraded.

Here, I'm lucky to hit 10. Usually it sits around 7-8, but can get as low as 1.5. The highest I ever saw it was 13 which was 24 hours after it was installed.

I have been testing with (legal) torrents to try and max the connection, and bizarrely, when I try the Ubuntu ISO I can max the connection (2.3mb/s down). I think this is probably because VM have an ubuntu mirror and therefore I was downloading from some peers/seeds within the VM network. Clearly the speed between my flat and the VM servers is fine.

I tried downloading OpenOffice, another open source torrent, and could only manage ~350kb/s. This isn't on any VM mirror that I'm aware of, so I thought it was a good comparison.

I usually use these two torrents as testers because they are among the healthiest torrents on the net. The OO one should have been maxing my connection too, but it wasn't.. so seemingly the problem is with external connections (i.e. outside VM's network).

There's no way we have downloaded more than the alotted limits, so capping should not be in effect.

Any thoughts? A lot of people seem to have trouble with the 20 meg product, and I'm wondering if I'm going to be yet another disgruntled customer.

12-09-2008, 16:30	#1
laurenced Inactive Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 8	Slightly disappointed with 20meg Hi all After being a VM cable customer for a year in my previous flat (4mb > 10mb) and being very happy with it, I decided to upgrade to 20meg when moving into a new place. Although it's far from slow, it's certainly not 20meg. I've been using the speedtester at http://speedtest.bbmax.co.uk. Now I know these things are never totally accurate, but in my last flat (which is just 5 mins down the road) I would get the proper readings for both my 4meg connection and latterly my 10meg connection when it was upgraded. Here, I'm lucky to hit 10. Usually it sits around 7-8, but can get as low as 1.5. The highest I ever saw it was 13 which was 24 hours after it was installed. I have been testing with (legal) torrents to try and max the connection, and bizarrely, when I try the Ubuntu ISO I can max the connection (2.3mb/s down). I think this is probably because VM have an ubuntu mirror and therefore I was downloading from some peers/seeds within the VM network. Clearly the speed between my flat and the VM servers is fine. I tried downloading OpenOffice, another open source torrent, and could only manage ~350kb/s. This isn't on any VM mirror that I'm aware of, so I thought it was a good comparison. I usually use these two torrents as testers because they are among the healthiest torrents on the net. The OO one should have been maxing my connection too, but it wasn't.. so seemingly the problem is with external connections (i.e. outside VM's network). There's no way we have downloaded more than the alotted limits, so capping should not be in effect. Any thoughts? A lot of people seem to have trouble with the 20 meg product, and I'm wondering if I'm going to be yet another disgruntled customer.