Switch to a better technology if you can, such as moving from an ADSL connection to a fibre optic connection.There are a number of ways you can speed up your broadband: Have you exceeded your download allowance? If you have a capped download allowance then when you hit the cap your provider will reduce your maximum download speed considerably.If you are using wifi and have a poor connection to your router (such as being a long way from the router).If you share a connection with many other people (such as a family sharing a connection) then this can slow each individual connection.If you are using mobile broadband then if there are many other users on the same network in your locality can swamp a cell tower.This will be especially obvious at peak times of day. Network congestion at your broadband provider, they have more customers online at one time than their network can easily handle.Due to technical constraints, such as being a long way from your exchange if you are on an ADSL connection.Your broadband could be slow for a number of reasons: The smaller the ping the faster the response time.įor best results make sure that no one else is using your connection when you run the test and that you are not using your broadband for any bandwidth heavy uses (such as video streaming). We also test the ping of your connection, this is the round trip time taken for packets of data to be sent to and from your broadband connection. The test first sends a small file to see how long this takes to download to get a quick estimate and then chooses a larger file for the main test depending on the initial estimate.įaster connections need larger test files to get accurate results. Our speedtest works by timing how long it takes your connection to download a file of known size from one of our speedtest servers.

Be sure to test at different times of day to get a true picture of your speeds. How to test your broadband speed For the best results always make sure that you aren't using your internet connection for anything else (like downloading email or watching videos) when doing a test.

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