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Bristol, BS31 2ED
Sales & Customer Support
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There many places on the internet to test your broadband speed but the best place we have found to go is https://speedof.me/ the tool allows you to accurately see your upload and download speed. Once you’re equipped with this data, you can then determine what you need to do, whether that be contacting your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or find out if there are devices using up lots of bandwidth.
Why this tester you may ask? Because it is compatible with any device, whether it be your Phone, PC, Laptop or Tablet. This is because it uses the HTML5 instead of Flash or Java like traditional web elements like speed testers and animations.
Usage of the broadband speed tester at SpeedOf.me doesn’t need to much of an explanation, as they make it nice and easy.
Press Start Test… and it will run a pass sample of data to analyse the speed.
It is just a matter of waiting for the tester to finish and it will then display the results of the broadband speed test.
The download speed is, you guessed it, the speed that you can download information from the internet and what most people look at and value the most. This is because the average person downloads far more than they upload, for things like looking at browsing Facebook or watching YouTube videos, which is all downloading apart from very small uploads of data that the websites use for tracking, advertising and analytics. Download speed doesn’t cover anything which you put up online like videos, videos or documents. But more on that in the next section.
The Upload speed is how fast you can get data from your device, on to the internet. Upload speed is important and often overlooked as the download speeds are faster, most of the time, but not always so ISPs often promote ho fast the downloads speeds are.
Most people use downloading a lot more than uploading. This is because you will usually browse a social network like Facebook for more than an hour a day which downloads data for the entire time but you may only post one image or not at all and therefore not really uploading anything other than the usage data, talked about in the download section.
If you only use the internet to check emails and surf the web for non-media content like news articles and blogs, then that would be considered as light usage. Therefore, you only require very standard broadband packages. 10 Mb/s or lower will suffice.
If you use the internet every day and stream movies, TV and Music or download a fair amount of data then it would be considered as medium usage. You’ll require a decent Fibre broadband package as Fibre is much faster than traditional copper cables. 30 Mb/s speeds or higher are recommended to have unrestricted streaming and downloading on medium usage.
Lastly, if you and your household spend many hours a day streaming, downloading or gaming then you will be classed as high usage. Meaning that you’ll need to take advantage of a high sped Fibre package that will give speeds of 50 Mb/s + or higher. This will provide you with all the bandwidth and speed that you require.
There are various reasons for your broadband speed to be affected, which could be causing you to experience slow speeds.
Distance from exchange: If you’re using a broadband connection which is ADSL (Traditional) or FTTC (Popular) then the connection experiences a degradation of quality and speed, the further you are from the big green cabinet, which is the exchange, the poorer it gets.
Exchange shared usage: There is no limit on how may customers of each ISP can pack in to an exchange and therefore, the more people using the exchange, the more your line is shared and as a result lower speeds.
Devices connected: If your home is filled with devices like smartphone, smart TV’s, computers and other internet connected devices then the higher likelihood of a slower speeds. This is because your connection speed is shared between lots of devices requiring the use of the broadband.
Weather: It sounds like a shady tactic from ISP’s to ‘get out of jail’ but is a very real reason for why broadband can slow down or cut out during adverse weather conditions.
Hardware & viruses: If you have old, dusty routers and cables then it’s not going to perform as well as the latest technology by a long way. But even if you’re using a new laptop and you get a virus infection then you may be susceptible to slow speeds as some viruses use your computer for their needs and it can eat up all available bandwidth, therefore giving you the perception of slow broadband.
Different applications require different speeds for their operation. Apps like Netflix require higher broadband speeds, compared to BBC News because of the amount of data which needs to be downloaded from them.
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