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Speed Diary: Day One

• Darren Waters
• 17 Feb 09, 15:10 GMT

I am one of the fortunate; a member of the broadband elite.

Last week I had a Virgin 50Mbps broadband connection installed and the goal is to put it to the test over the next week or so and explore the limits of the online fast lane.

Yesterday I described my set-up experiences but I wanted to focus Day One proper on raw speeds, and putting the connection through an obstacle course of downloads and uploads.

The first place to start is with some formal speed tests. Virgin's own website says that just one third-party site is equipped to deal with its XXL connection, .

I also had a link to an internal Virgin speed test site.

I tested the connection on both a wired and wireless configuration. (For those who want to know: an 802.11n router with WPA2 encryption)

Wired

Thinkbroadband put my download speeds at 37Mbps downstream and 1.5Mbps upstream.
The Virgin test put my speed at 46Mbps down and 1.5Mbps.

So why the variation? Andrew Ferguson, from Thinkbroadband.com, told me it was to be expected. The Virgin test had "less network" in the way between my connection and its own test.

Wireless

Both Thinkbroadband.com and Virgin put my download at about 35Mbps and upload at 1Mbps.

If you are seeking absolute speed then an Ethernet connection, always beats wi-fi - even the 802.11n standard. But even so, my contact at Virgin felt I should be seeing faster speeds over the wireless connection. I'll be keeping an eye on this speed over the week.

But there are plenty of other reasons why you won't always see the advertised speeds - even if you are on a wired connection.

The age of your computer, interference from other devices, bandwidth saturation on wi-fi can all have an effect.

So what about some real world tests? How would the connection perform under a heavy load?

The first thing I tried was a straight single download of a large file - in this case, the Linux distribution (an open source operating system) Ubuntu. This is a large file of almost 700MB and I got speeds of up to 5.4MB per second during the download and it landed on my desktop in about four minutes.

One of the best ways to test your download is to simultaneously download a series of large files and then add up all the downstream speeds. I downloaded five large game demo files and each one was flying down the pipe at more than 1MB per second.

These two tests would seem to indicate that I was hitting very close to the advertised 50Mbps.

It's not that often I download a large program file but I do download and stream quite a bit of video. So how would the connection cope with HD video?

I picked a HD version of 30 Rock to download - in all, about 750MB of comedy heaven. I went from click to buy to click to play and Tina Fey in HD quality in under six minutes.

HD trailers streamed in 720p from the Apple movies website were ready to start watching in about 15 seconds, while a 720p HD download of a game trailer from Xbox Live took 50 seconds to download the 108MB file.

But what about the neglected sibling of broadband speed: upstream?

The tests would seem to suggest I have between 1Mbps and 1.5Mbps - but what does this mean in the real world?
I'll be testing these upload speeds with some online gaming later in the week - and inviting you all to come and join me in a game of Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3 - but I started with a simple test.

I uploaded five high quality Jpegs - about 17MB in all - to Flickr and the process took 90 seconds to complete.

So that's Day One of testing. I welcome your thoughts and questions. You can follow some more of my tests and experiences on my Twitter feed @darrenwaters. I'll be sharing my gamertag with people on the Twitter feed later in the week.