How Fast Is Your Broadband?

Aldous Huxley once said, ‘Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.’ In this day and age, only the fastest can survive and that holds good for broadband connections as well.

Broadband developers are constantly trying to cater to our impatience and find the fastest means to connect to the Internet. This does not mean that all broadband connections give you the same speed for downloading or browsing. Your broadband speed depends on many factors and listed below are few of the factors that affect it.

• Type of Broadband Connection: Broadband connections that come with fiber optic technology are the fastest variants available in the market. The latest advancement, developed by Virgin Media, delivers a browsing speed of 1.5Gbps. With a connection this super-fast, 3-hour long movies can be downloaded within a few seconds!

• However, the most commonly used broadband connections are DSL, cable and wireless. Though they are slower than fiber optic broadband connections, they have browsing speeds of 4-10Mbps, which is fast enough for normal browsing.

• Automatic Downloads: Sometimes, certain programs update automatically and they download large size updates, which slow down your overall browsing speed. Since they download the updates automatically, you may not be aware that a download is taking place. Therefore, one should check for any download that may be slowing his or her Internet speed before you move on to other factors.

• Browser Memory Cache: Your Internet browser tends to remember certain data from websites you visit, so that they can load faster whenever you visit the website again in the future. Over time, the memory cache gets full and slows down your browsing speed, as a result. Clearing the cache helps speed up your browsing experience considerably.

• Problems with your ISP: There may be some technical difficulties experienced by your Internet service providers, which affect your Internet connectivity. Your modem router also may not be configured correctly in some instances. Calling them to sort it out will help improve your connection.

• Hardware Problems: Your computer may be getting too old to support the latest technology of your high speed Internet connection or there might be an antivirus problem that affects your browsing.

So how fast is your broadband?

The global average for broadband speed was found to be 2.3Mbps, the fastest average speed seen in South Korea at 17.5Mbps. Internet service providers may swear that they give you extremely high speed browsing but these values are generally calculated with optimum browsing constraints. Generally, with normal data traffic, your speed will be just around a maximum of 60 % of what you were promised.

This happens due to several users accessing the Internet at the same time. In the United Kingdom, the average broadband speed was calculated to be 5.6Mbps. Edinburgh topped the list at 10.1Mbps, closely followed by Bristol having 9.9Mbps, while the slowest were Fermanagh and Cookstown in Northern Ireland having average speeds of 4.3 and 4.4Mbps respectively.

However, this does not include super-fast broadband connections (speeds over 24Mbps), which are mostly seen in Luton and Newtownabbey in Belfast. With the development of fiber optic broadband connections, the average speeds will definitely go higher, once the technology is put into use.
If you wish to test the speed of your broadband connection, take the simple Internet speed test that can be found online.

The test works by sending empty packets of data to and from your device to its servers, and the results are given to you immediately once your connection’s download and upload speeds are calculated. For optimum results, take the test after 10p.m. so that the peak usage time is avoided. However, you can take the test at the busiest time of the day to calculate how slow your Internet connection can actually get. Therefore, go ahead and take that test and find out where exactly you fit on the global range.

Nathan Morgan has been an IT professional for 14 years.