Comments on: Internet supplier row

By: maca

maca — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 21:45:27 +0000

Antonio, i’m not sure who owns the wires. We were with this company before, with a 1Mb connection and it was good. But now i’m not so happy.

Gerry, I tried the Blacknight test and got from 1Mb-1.7Mb in a number of tests. The thing i’m disappointed about is that when I had a 1Mb conection all the tests gave results of .9-.95Mb, so I expected more from the 2Mb connection.

By: Gerry O'Sullivan

Gerry O'Sullivan — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 22:13:25 +0000

It's hard to know, maca. I find that speed tests vary a lot depending on where the test originates. Just now I did one using the link in your post and it came back 1.4Mbps. Then I did one with Blacknight, an Irish hosting company, and it came back at 1.7Mbps. Like yourself, my advertised speed is 2Mbps. What's the advertised contention ratio from your service provider? I'm with UTV, and am getting 24:1.

By: Antonio from Italy

Antonio from Italy — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 18:16:49 +0000

Is this supplier the owner of the wires?
I mean, in Italy we have different provider for voice and internet connection.
But only one (Telecom Italia) is the owner of the wires to houses.
So, other companies rent a portion on bandwidth from Telecom Italia to give their clients the service.
But how do they make their cash? By selling the same bandwidth to more users than that bandwidth can stand.
So the users complain that the speed is not the advertised one.
Example: Telecom Italia is currently giving 4 Mb/s connections. If it rents 400 Mb/s to a different company, this one will give this bandwidth to 200 users that will surf the net at 2 Mb/s instead of 4.
Nominally everybody is surfing at 4, but only if there’s nobody else on the web along with you…
Anyway, I don’t know if you have enough elements for complaining. You will need sort of a data logger that keeps records of the speed minute by minute for a long time…