Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Speed

Okies, the previous "broadband" speeds were -

Download 0.47Mb/s and upload 0.24Mb/s, which Speedtest.net claims is slower than
91% of the country (but I suspect is slower than a lot more of the country!)
That test was back in April.

Todays test, using the 4G broadband is -

Download 7.81 and upload 6.82

So it seems to be slightly better!
The speeds do seem variable - the BT engineers suggested that the speeds were being capped and changed around at the moment, so perhaps it will change later.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

4G has landed!

Well, the 4G is here. Two BT Openreach vans, two BT guys to simply hand me a router and check the speed via their laptop and dongle.... hmmm...
Ah well, they were not here long and no aerial needed. First impressions - well, I did expect something faster on the download side, but upload is 8meg! Download is coming on for 8meg actual measured speeds, so not terrible, but I had read a bit before about this and speeds of 40Meg were mentioned. The BT guys said that they thought the speeds had been capped since yesterday - when it was a lot faster. So either it was unstable or the trial doesn't need us all downloading the whole interwebs!

I shall post some speed readings in a day or two.

My only main issues at the moment are -

1 Websites think you are in Germany! But this is because the router has a German SIM card in it apparently. No real problem, but a bit odd going to Google.com and getting Google.de in German!

2 And I can't blame the 4G for this odd anomoly - my ethernet card on the main PC stops my machine booting into Linux when I enable it in the BIOS! Even a live cd (and I tried with a couple of live cds from different distros) won't boot with the ethernet enabled. Disable it and the machine is happy. So for now, I have a wireless dongle stuck in there.

Strange but true....

Thursday, September 22, 2011

4G

We are getting a trial of the 4G broadband next week! I shall report on the speeds we get ten - as well as any issues with it.
Will be interesting to see how it works with Linux....