This is because speeds are dependent on the distance to the exchange (for conventional broadband) or to the street cabinet (for fibre broadband).Īs shown in the chart below, fibre broadband connection speeds decline with distance from the fibre street cabinet. Just because your ISP claims that your broadband connection offers speeds “up to 24 Mbps” (for ADSL2+ conventional broadband) or “up to 80 Mbps” (for VDSL2 fibre broadband), it won’t mean that you’ll be able to achieve such speeds. In major part, this is due to its use of many geographically-distributed servers, which allows you to run a test on a server that is located physically close to you.įirst set your expectations based on distance if you are using basic broadband or fibre broadband Use our online speed testīelow is our online speed test, provided by Ookla, which we believe is the most accurate online tester available based on extensive measurement. Provided that you take the right precautions and choose the right online speed test (like the one below), an online speed test can be reasonably accurate and a useful tool to assess a broadband connection. Bizarrely, one particular speed test (the BT Wholesale test) massively overstates performance. It’s not surprising that broadband providers completely ignore any online speed tests that have been performed by their customers. In most cases, because of the many factors involved, they may indicate that your broadband connection is performing much worse than it really is. You need to be very cautious with online speed tests. We identify the best and worst online speed tests. We’ve lost count of the number of people that have told us that their broadband connection is not working properly because an online speed test has reported low or highly variable speeds.

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