Up To 20Mbps Broadband
March 10th, 2010
In fotoLibra’s offices in London and Harlech we use Zen as our service provider, and we have no complaints about them at all. In fact we can heartily recommend them, having used them for the past five years.
They’ve just upgraded our broadband service from 8Mbps to “up to 20Mbps”, which is very exciting.
Before they upgraded us I tested our speeds. It averaged 4.79Mbps download, and 0.36Mbps upload. That’s ADSL for you; if we had straightforward Digital Subscriber Lines like they do in Germany instead of Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Lines,we’d be able to upload and download at the same speed.
That’s why downloading an image from fotoLibra is over 13 times faster than uploading an image to us. We’re sorry, but unless you’ve got DSL there’s not a lot we can do about it.
Back to our “up to 20Mbps” upgrade. It came on stream this morning, so I tested our speeds again.
6.23Mbps download, 0.67Mbps upload. Not as thrilling as I’d hoped. That’s 31% of the potential speed. We were getting 60% of our potential speed on the previous deal. Why should the percentage decrease so greatly?
Still, it’s a little faster, so that is a good thing.
But have you noticed that “UP TO” always actually means “LESS THAN”?
[…] Up to 20 Mbps Broadband […]
Yes, the “up to” is a great selling feature.
I wish I could pay “up to” their price too.
Of my “up to” 16M broadband I’m getting 10Mbs.
And it’s suspicious that throughput exceeds 10 for a fraction of a second before it is throttled back to the magic figure.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1001799404.png
The good news is that the company I bought it from has gone bust, twice.
Formerly Euphony, went in to administration, now Hive.
And the grapevine on Facebook shows massive redundancies at Hive this week.
So I’m been playing the “up to” and “unlimited” games again, looking for a new provider.
I wonder if they are up to the job of delivering on their mother of all broadband promise?
We had 200 line outages in one day last week; it turned out the physical BT cable outside the office had been frayed by rubbing against shrubbery. They replaced it without demur but after a considerable delay.
We then only got 920 kbps upload speed so we called Zen, who discovered that BT had capped our line at 1 Mbps because our 200 outages a day might have affected their equipment in the exchange. Zen got them to restore our “up to” 20 Mbps connection and our current speeds are:
Download Speed: 6154 kbps (769.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 880 kbps (110 KB/sec transfer rate)
Less than a third of the advertised speed, but I can still heartily recommend Zen Internet. You get what you pay for, in my experience.