PC Help: Measure your actual broadband speed

Q I welcome your campaign to monitor broadband speeds but I am concerned that my ISP will disregard the results, as it insists that the only measure of broadband speed it will consider is the BT Speedtester.

This does not always work, takes a long time to run and always produces speeds higher than any other speed tester I have used, thus making my ISP’s service look better than it actually is.

As an example, I ran the Computeractive speed tester three times and the BT one once during a short period this morning and the results are: BT 3.3Mbits/sec, Computeractive 1.9Mbits/sec average.

Dave Duncan

A The BT Speedtester checks only the part of your broadband connection that BT is responsible for – that is, the line between its exchange and your home. The ISP is responsible for the other part, from the exchange to its servers and on to the internet.

That means that although the BT tester is useful for diagnosing line faults, it doesn’t provide a good indication of the speed at which you can download from the internet. This will vary depending on the ISP’s network, how many customers it serves in your area and how many are online at any one time.

Our tester measures what’s called the end-to-end connection, which takes into account a real connection from your computer to the servers that we use to administer the tests.

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