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Has anyone else experienced truely dreadful broadband spped lately? 
There  was a whisper that the village broadband was  to be  upgraded in the fairly near future. Does anyone know any more?
If you have found unreasonably poor broadband speeds lately, please  let me know. The Parish Council may be able  to put some  pressure on BT  for an upgrade if there is  enough evidence of how slow the service has  become.

it is a pity that the village has not, or cannot be connected to the new cabling along the main road, but it may be that an improvement could be made by an upgrade  at the exchange. 
If i'm not the only one frustrated by the present speeds,  please speak up!
Margaret

According to the website Samknows, http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/SMSAN the Steeple Aston exchange was targeted by BT to be upgraded to a 21st century exchange by Q3 2009.  I have rung BT to ask them when this will actually be done, but they told me the information request had to come from my ISP.  Perhaps the Parish Council will have more clout with BT than me.

If you want to know what the 21st century network will offer, there is more info on the above website, but hopefully it will include faster speeds, and access to a much wiser range of suppliers.

Thanks Stan, that's useful info.. P.C will certainly follow  it up. 
Any more evidence of unacceptable service, please continue to post. Margaret

My recent experience is that speeds are a bit variable, though I couldn't honestly say they've been disastrous.
My contract with Plusnet promises "up to 8Mbs" download speed, which is normally reckoned to mean
about 6Mbs in practice, I think.
I ran a test at 2 p.m. this afternoon and got a downlaod speed of 5.9 Mbs, which is pretty respectable.
By 5.15 pm., the download speed had dropped to 4 Mbs, still by no means disastrous - and almost certainly
slower because people were getting home from work and school and logging on, thereby creating more traffic on the system.
Others don't seem to have been so lucky, I appreciate that - but I think it's quite important if we're to approach BT et al
that we have some concrete figures on download speeds to report, especially at peak times.
You can get a speed reading quite easily from this website: http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk/

I use BT as my server and today's download speed at 15.35hrs was 6.2 which is pretty well the norm.  I would have thought this to be pretty good but no expert.

I pay Demon for up to 8Mb broadband and having run tests at various times over the last week, I vary from 1Mb today at midday up to 2.8Mb at 7am on Thursday.  Not exactly what I was hoping for!

 I've managed to have speeds on Tiscali of over 6500kbps.  Just had a reading via Peter's link of 5828 at 1721hours and an upload speed of 380 - whatever that means !!

Further to my earlier post - I've been running some more speed checks after sensing that my own broadband speed was slowing up - especially in the afternoons/early evenings.
Around 5pm yesterday and today, I've had trouble getting as high as 2Mb -and it's sometimes been less than 1 Mb, which is very poor as my ISP contract specifies up to 8 MB.
In mid-morning, however, it's a different story. Then, I usually get 5Mb-plus, which is OK.
Given that it's winter and it gets dark early, I strongly suspect the poor late-afternoon performanc is due to increased traffic on the system as more and more people get home from work/school and start uisng the system heavily at the same time.
In other words, it's not that the wires are incapable of delivering higher speeds per se, but that there's insufficient bandwidth to accommodate the number of users who are logging on late-afternoon, especially in winter. If others could try an 11 a.m. v 5 p.m, comparison, it would be interesting to know the results.

I have had the same problems.  Before 9am I can get 5mb+ - after 1pm it has fallen to as little as less than half a meg.  That's been the case for about a week now.

John Coley

Just to update the debate.  I now fairly regularly obtain 60mbs before and after 0900.  Must have been loads of folk logged on for Christmas Pressie hunting

This website was recommended to me - www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk
When it has checked your broadband speed, you can enter your postcode and it shows you what speed other people living nearby are getting, and their broadband provider. 
It also measures the distance from your house to the telephone exchange and tells you the maximum speed you can expect.