[horseman]

Originally Posted by samtayloryork

....
There are various speed tests available to users some test the network (usually linked to the provider) some are connection. I am using WHICH & BT as a baseline and up 4 others at random at same time to check. Unfortunately it is not always clear what is what.

Unfortunately all the web (and client based) speed tests are potentially inconsistent/inaccurate which is why SamKnows developed hardware based test suite that is used by major UK (and other Worldwide) ISP's, OfCom to produce (within 95% confidence) comparative of "end user" averages by Speed Tier(and other performance metrics) and ISP.

FWIW, here's 2 Brighton users Downstream results(by hour) for Vivid200 tier from 1October2015 to current date of posting:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ox6zrs7v2...35.33.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8vxwvg3872...34.40.png?dl=0

You can derive many reports along with monthly averages and compare these with SK/VM published UK average results each month:
http://store.virginmedia.com/broadband/speeds.html

Obviously these 2 reports only represent a trivially small proportion of the samples that relates to the SK/VM/OfCom stats.