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Update on ADSL

I have written about the performance of ADSL ( or broadband as this connection is commonly referred ). I am particularly concerned that often people sign up to services from which they expect to get “up to 8 Meg” etc….. Reality is of course that actual performance ofter falls way short of this level. The BBC has an interesting article that states that currently average download speeds are in the region of 2Mbps compared to 512kbps three years ago. If the average is 2Mbps we can expect that some people will see better than this and some will see average performance which is lower than this figure. The the earlier tests I have documented substantiate this. Read the article and take particular note of the comment towards the end of the article about Japan where apparently speeds of 50 – 60 Mbps are possible using VDSL.

Click Here to see the BBC article

It would be interesting to see a little more information about average download speeds in the UK at peak times! I have seen performance on an up to 8 Mbps service vary between 6.5Mbps and 250kbps depending on the time of day! Evening speeds are typically in the region of a few hundred k’s this is when most users want to use their BB service.

It seems that the UK regulator is holding back on the introduction of VDSL and VDSL2 until some problems which relate to radio interference when these technologies are delivered over telephone lines. Hopefully, it will not be too long before we see this next generation of technology being introduced here!