8Mb Broadband - worth the bother?
 

BT have offered to upgrade my 2Mb to 8Mb for free, though there are a couple of catches, have to agree another 12 months and change billing method.

However, will I really see any improvement? Rarely do I see download speeds reach that magic 200k+ per sec as it is, thats usually if I have several torrents on the go, and they are not increasing my 40 gig cap.

If they aren't going to remove your cap then it isnt worth it. I have 10 mb with no cap and i can easily download 40 Gb in 2 days. The speed is good from the newsgroups etc but if you only have 40 Gb per month i would save myself the trouble.

Yeah, I'd want the cap removed really.

so how do these newsgroups work then ?

The other thing to be wary of is were you are in relation to the exchange. It is my understanding that if you are more than a 1 mile from the exchange (by wires not as the crow flies then you wont get 8mb) I would google it to find out what other people have experienced. I do know of someone that only got 8mb on rare occasions mostly hovered around the 4mb to 5mb.

think it depends more on the contention ratio...how many people are connected to the main line..e.g a contention ratio of 50/1 means 50 people can be connected to the main line however if you are in a quiet street and only a couple of people are connected to it your speed will be faster than a large street with 50 people connected to it,it also depends where you download from as the 8mb only applies to download speeds all upload speeds are set at i think its 512mb regardless of your isp therefore if you are dragging direct from someone else then your capped to there upload speed if your using torrents where you are downloading from however many people have the file online then your speed is increased..then again i could be talking b******s its years since i did any downloading :roll: