ADSL upload speeds at parents house make me appreciate how good my own superfast broadband is.
At home I get about 7Mbps upload and on a reasonable day 35Mbps down. In the office on the ja.net we can on occasion get 100Mbps symmetrical. Yeeeeooooowwwwnnnggggg. That is good.
At my parents in the Isle of Man the much slower ADSL upload speed is really noticeable. Improved upload speeds are the one game changer that FTTC or superfast broadband has brought. In our media dominated world where ad hoc videos and pictures of interesting sights that we think “oo I’ll take a photo of that” and never look at it again though it is taking up storage space at more than one location, having good upload bandwidth is v important.
I feel somewhat awkward complaining about an ADSL connection where many people don’t even have that. In a world where broadband has become another utility ADSL seems almost like having a gas or electricity supply that only comes on at certain times of the day. Or it’s like having to always cook using a slow cooker. It’s something you have to plan around.
Added 06/07/2014: Now that I have kids living away from home the upload speeds they have for their own broadband connections are very noticeable. Kid3 at Uni in Durham always shows up quite pixelated whereas I’m sure that my own upload stream will result in a good clear image of me
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3 replies on “ADSL upload speeds – ugh”
On market 1 exchanges like ours everyone gets 0.38Mbps on a good day. There are millions like us. And they call it ‘digital britain’.
Yep, the skinflints that won’t pay for the faster upload services on Market 1 only get 448. If 832 isn’t worth paying for their lives clearly do not depend on it.
Much of the problem is the national lack of understanding of what is possible compared with what’s provided. I believe many just accept unequal speeds because they don’t know same up and down is possible. It’s not helped by the advertising download “speed wars” between BT & VM. VM’s 150 Mbps network is vastly more reliable and doesn’t need a horrendously expensive gargantuan workforce. Yet the ever-changing delays make it very bad for things which can only work properly with same up & down. BT’s faster services quite deliberately hit the upload speeds far harder on bad lines so some aren’t any better that they were before. Try looking at this link for a few minutes to see how bad multiple contributors on lash-up uneven connections look like and then imagine you’re trying to lip read !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXgbRpcpziI