how can i find out if y internet is working at the right speed

[mustsleep]

i have just switched back to virgin media

i took out 4mb broadband but was finding it a bit too slow so have upgraded last night to up to 20mb broadband

i can't say that i can notice a difference and for example when on mn i still have to wait for the page to load up on "my threads" abd would have thought it would be faster then this now

does anyone know how you can find out what speed your internet is working at in reality and i would fix the slowness

i have defragmented my harddrive and deleted everything in the rcycle bin but this has not helped

There is a website you can go to and test it.

Virgin have I think just been done by the ASA for misleading on their broadband speeds.

Google appropriately - don't have link because this is a DH geeky area!

The problem you may have is that the speed of your connection isn't the only factor. The bandwidth at the Mumsnet end is likely to be more limiting than the bandwidth at your end.

If Mumsnet has a 1 Mb link the fastest you will get from Mumsnet is 1Mb and probably a lot less because you are sharing that 1Mb with other people. It's only on sites that have a lot of bandwidth themselves that you'll see the benefit of a faster link at your end.

I'd guess that Mumsnet is on a server in a hosting company and share their bandwidth with other hosted websites, but I'm only guessing here.

The best way is to download from a fast site so here are two that are usually blindingly fast. Try them both and watch the download speed. You don't have to let them finish.

Test A

Test B

Try the thinkbroadband speed test.

some more that give realistic results

www.speedtest.net

myspeed.visualware.com/uk/index.html

www.spe edtest.bbmax.co.uk/

thanks think i may need tophone virgin

it's supposed to be up to 20 mb but it's coming out on these tests at 2.58mb!!!!

Also some tests may cause confusion in the way they display the numbers. For example my download speed is 11mbs, but while downloading a large file here it will say 1.10MBs. The first number is actually megaBITS per second and the second is megaBYTES per second which is different.

On an 'up to 20mbs' service you would expect download speed to be less than about 2.3MB? (maybe a lot less in reality as 'up to' means what it says)