(solved) Internet not as fast as the company says?

Networking Networking Hardware
1

I was wondering uif someone could help me: i've got a internet plan with sky, it's a U.K company, they say i am meant to be getting 14mb/s download and 2mb/s upload. This is not true; my main PC has 2 ethernet ports, cables plugged in to both, but i'm lucky to get 1mb/s. This is the same with my laptop, HTPC and xbox 360 (only a single cable in each.) I've spoken to sky and they claim that: there is nothing wrong with the internet it's all of my hardware. I can't imagine this is true but could it be the router being slow due to it being the router they give you?

2

Unplug everything except the modem and a single cable from that to your PC. Then test the speed. If its good, your network hardware has something guff somewhere in the topology. If its still bad, retry the speed test but with a different computer. Still bad? Its the modem, get Sky to replace it.

Edit: Also, you know the difference between megabytes and megabits right? Cause getting 1 megabyte/sec is about right for a 14 megabit connection.

3

Your internet company is most likely advertising their internet speeds in Mbps instead of what your computer downloads file and such which is MBps. The conversion is that 1 Megabit(Mbps) is equal to 0.125 Megabytes(MBps). So your internet speed x 0.125 = 1.75MBps (although it is more than likely going to be slower than than, which in your case it is)

Hope that clears things up.

4

How do you measure internet speed? SpeedTest ? Can you show specific plan in sky webpage? 

Can you tell us what router do you have? 

5

Just the router they gave me

6

Thanks for the reply i tried your conversion method. I got near to my speed i am paying for.

7

Sky is nearly the worst you can get for reliability of speed. Consider switching to Virgin Media or BT Infinity for good speeds as these are the only reasonable options in the UK. Sky use old copper phone line cables and these are usually very old, if you want BT to fix these (The owner of these cables) they will only do so if there is actually a problem (Completely breaking the internet), however if there is an issue with latency, packet loss (to an extent) or just super slow speeds they will do nothing!

 

Also, Sky do not allow the replacement of routers and they will automatically block any Non-sky routers.