Broadband Speeds: why they might not be what you think

Broadband is heating up as the hottest commodity of this new century we of the human race seem to have found ourselves in. Like a new industrial revolution the technology is increasing at a rate of knots to change even the most basic aspects of our lives.

Basically we need broadband and we want the latest speeds. Internet service have been famous for promoting incredible speeds recently, most incredulously BT were offering a service called "Infinite Broadband" which seemed to imply endless possibilities. Customers soon found that "infinity" certainly wasn't the case for them, adverts were simply promoting and charging for the ideal speeds reached under test conditions. Many customers were experiencing dramatically lower download times as they were subtly being subject to "reasonable usage" clauses.

Ofcom were able to step to the rescue and force service providers to promote more realistic figures of what customers will receive in order to stop customers paying extra for speeds they have little chance of enjoying.

Why then do speeds vary so much? There are two main reasons, firstly there is a great amount of fluctuation due to demands from varying volumes of people demanding the network, and secondly different regions are linked with networks of varying efficiency.

Public internet consumption varies wildly depending of the time of day. First thing in the morning the majority of the country are just stumbling hazy eyed out of bed and struggling to work their toasters, they aren't so conce
ed with streaming videos of funny kittens on Youtube. Peak times however occur between about six and ten o-clock, this is when huge proportions of the public are coming back from work or school and can think of no better way to unwind than with those same Youtube videos of kittens falling over.

This peak in demand is enormous, although the internet seems ethereal, it does need to travel to work and the network does get bunged up in much the same way as a traffic jam. Meaning that at those peak times your download speed will be much slower.

There is also a general regional difference: different areas are linked with different generations of network cables. Old copper cables were useful in older times for phone signals, but are nowhere near as efficient as modern fibre optic cables. More profitable urban areas were the first to benefit, however exposed rural areas are seriously struggling to get a look in, meaning many rural areas and small towns are still languishing with slower speeds.

So your broadband speeds are, for the moment stuck in a fluctuating state depending on your location and even the time of day. To find out the average speeds of a specific area there are services in place on price comparison websites that can let you know average speeds per post codes, then you can be best prepared to making sure you don't pay for speeds you won't realistically receive.