Slow broadband blackspots mostly in south, not north
Contention ratio an issue, possibly?
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Online tests from uswitch.com have found more "internet blackspots" in the south of England than in the north and found the quickest internet access in the UK is in Leamington Spa with download speeds of 18.665Mb/s.
The numbers come from people conducting their own tests via the comparison site's online tests and should be viewed with caution. But the company claims 400,000 lines were tested between May and July this year.
Cranbrook in Kent has the slowest download speeds of any area tested with just 1.32Mb/s. Second place is Tregaron in Wales followed by Lavant near Chichester.
Overall Kent and Sussex were the worst counties, while the average speed across the UK is 6.8Mb/s. ®
COMMENTS
Crapola Kit
An how much of this is down to el crapola kit, old routers, 802.11b wireless kit in use + other wireless artifacts, Poor cabling, spyware infested PCs and more. Sorry but these stats really do mean little if anything.
I've had fair few customers say 'my 16Mb brodband is slow and it says I onlt get 2Mb'. Normally fixed by giving the PC some TLC or evicting the almost fossilized Linksys router downstairs between 3 brick walls, a sheet of lead and an army of DECT phones. 'Oh I didnt think we needed to plug that in' when questioned about the shiney new router still in its box.
utter tosh
I live on a brand new building estate and the fastest I can get is 576kbps. No virgin cable anywhere and over 7 k from nearest exchange. I'm up north. Probably around 5000 households all with crap broadband.
Hah!
"but if you are sharing your concentrator in the exchange with 49 other people, and a large number of those are on-line and making use of bandwith-heavy applications (streaming media, bittorrent, etc), then you can *easily* find yourself down to speeds in the 1-2 MBps range at peak times."
1-2 MB/s. I wish! That's about as high as I ever get and that not often. As said above it depends on the distance from the exchange and I'm over 2 miles away from mine.

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