let's talk about the fascinating topic of internet speeds

[sim667]

Coax is copper.

I mean phone line.... coax is faster than phoneline.....

Monday morning brain.

 

[T & P]

We recently upgraded our Virgin broadband to ‘super fast fibre blah blah blah’ of up to 300mb, not because we needed it but as part of a package. A couple of days ago it occurred to me to check the speed and it was a paltry 40mb.

The engineer had said sometimes they might forget to ‘switch on’ the faster speed so I should check and give them a call if the speed wasn’t good enough. I was just going to call them but thought of asking Ms T&P to check the speed on her brand new, latest model iPhone and she got 171mb. Yet I’m still getting 40-odd on my older phone, and a bit less on my ancient iPad.

I can understand older and less processing power-capable devices to perhaps register a slightly slower speed, but I was shocked to see such a massive difference. At the end of the day a speed test surely is all about measuring the internet speed coming in, rather than asking a device to process complex operations?

 

[Sasaferrato]

Thanks all for the thoughts so far. UnderAnOpenSky Fez909, do you make many video calls? Is quality consistently high?

I'm also interested in what might be a reliable and reasonably fast solution for connecting my laptop to wifi on the move. In the past I've used the hotspot on my phone, when I was with 3 – generally worked well, but definitely not 100% reliable.

Here in Japan, I've got a Wimax pocket wifi thingy, which typically gets around 20mbps down and 5 mbps up – so not super-fast, but it seems more stable than using a phone hotspot. Is there something like that in the UK?

There are big bits of the UK that would think they had died and gone to heaven if they got those speeds.

 

[mauvais]

We recently upgraded our Virgin broadband to ‘super fast fibre blah blah blah’ of up to 300mb, not because we needed it but as part of a package. A couple of days ago it occurred to me to check the speed and it was a paltry 40mb.

The engineer had said sometimes they might forget to ‘switch on’ the faster speed so I should check and give them a call if the speed wasn’t good enough. I was just going to call them but thought of asking Ms T&P to check the speed on her brand new, latest model iPhone and she got 171mb. Yet I’m still getting 40-odd on my older phone, and a bit less on my ancient iPad.

I can understand older and less processing power-capable devices to perhaps register a slightly slower speed, but I was shocked to see such a massive difference. At the end of the day a speed test surely is all about measuring the internet speed coming in, rather than asking a device to process complex operations?

WiFi standards evolve in various ways and your slower devices are probably confined to an older one, which will account for a speed limit.

It's unlikely you could take advantage of more than 40Mbps on a mobile device, so don't worry about it.