Slow broadband / will switching help?

[doomey!]

My broadband has become painfully slow, I have to go away and wait for youtube to load, its that slow.

Anyway my question is If I swapped my broadband to another ISP would it improve? I only ask this as it confuses me how or if it could improve, seeing how its the phone line that provides it (really).

I am on AOL right now, the speed I should be getting is about 8mbs (the max for my area anyway) , I am currently only receiving about 2mb connection. :(

[mollykins]

In my house, we were getting about 1/2 a mb we now just about get 1mb, but we were paying for more, so we phoned them up to complain, and they capped it at 1mb and charged us less than what we paid before and now we actually get about 1mb. I don't know how it works but it did.

[mollykins]

Also, switching may or may not help, depending on the reason why it's slow.

[Garmard]

I was with AOL about a year ago and found there service completely awful, we swapped providers to Virgin Media and found the speed of there broadband hugely better. Consider Virgin Media if you want better speed.

[doomey!]

Sadly I cant get virgin here. No cable. :(

[Garmard]

Sky Broadband are supposed to be good?

[ChuckFickens]

put your details in here and it will tell you roughly how fast you can expect.

http://www.productsan...FURL_broadband/faster

you are quite correct in your assumption that often changing ISP will make no difference to speed as it's normally the phone line that is the limit.

[Garmard]

The old copper wires BT and other providers(except Virgin Media) use are just pants but they are changing to the faster fibreoptic technology that Virgin already has.

[doomey!]

Thanks for the answers guys and gals. I suspect my drop in speed is due to some new houses going up, dropping my speed. Shenanigans!

[Buenchico]

Many ISPs 'throttle' internet traffic, based upon the time of day and/or the type of traffic. (It's called 'traffic shaping'). A quick bit of Googling confirms that AOL certainly does so. That might be the cause of your problem.

You indicate that you're getting speeds of around 2Mbps, which suggests that you've already used a speed checker, such as the excellent Speedtest.net:
http://www.speedtest.net/
But have you also run a ping test? That effectively tests the quality of your line (rather than that of your ISP). You're looking for an 'A' grade here:
http://www.pingtest.net/

If you get a low grade from a ping test it's your phone line which is the most likely cause of your problem. If you get a good result from a ping test it might be time to change your broadband supplier. You tend to get what you pay for. The best available service (in my opinion) is Claranet, which repeatedly wins awards for its services to major businesses. However it's not cheap:
http://www.claranetsoho.co.uk/broadband
BT is frequently rated highly in reviews:
http://www.productsan...oryId=CON-TOTAL-BB-R1

Chris

[ChuckFickens]

if you've recently had a lot of new properties built in the area then it might well be because of that, all ISP's (well domestic ones) operate using contention ratios, which basically means you are sharing your 8Mbs connection with probably upto about 50 other people, if a lot of them are online at the same time you will see a lower speed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contention_ratio

[doomey!]

Thanks Buenchico. I will have to investigate a bit more my results are very depressing. coming in at .08mb and F rating *sad face*

[netibiza]

Buenchico, that is fabulous, I have just pinged and I'm average, which I'm pleased about. as I'm on a small notebook halfway up a spanish mountain on a little island in the med, and it works, brill.

[MalcolmY]

I used to be on AOL but changed to O2 just over a year ago. I have found them absolutely brilliant. They have a very helpful UK based help centre. When I reported a slight drop in download speed they didn't give me the usual cop out of distance from the exchange, length of internal wiring in the house but simply talked me through how to reset my router. This worked just fine and I now regularly get a download speed of 4MB.

[doomey!]

Aol cant give me that excuse, the exchange is a minutes walk from my house. *laughs*

[doomey!]

Does anyone know if I cancel my aol account if I can keep my email addresses? Or are they tied to my aol account>

[Buenchico]

Using an email address linked to an ISP is never a good idea for precisely the reason you seem to have recognised. i.e. if you close the account you'll lose your access to AOL's mail servers.

Open a non-ISP-based account now and let everyone know your change of address. Then close your AOL account. There are dozens (or, more likely, hundreds) of free email services but the vast majority of them only allow you to send and receive mail through web-based access. (i.e. you can't use an email client, such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail or Thunderbird). The most popular free service which lets you access your mail via both methods is Google's Gmail. My own preference though is to use Gawab. Details of setting up a Gawab account are in my first post here:
http://www.theanswerb...t/Question407429.html
(See paragraph 3, et seq)

Chris

[doomey!]

Thanks. And botheration..lol