Virgin: 9 out of 10 speedtesters are wrong

 

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Posted on 12 Nov 2008 at 12:46

Virgin Media claims that nine out of ten broadband speedtests are incapable of measuring its new high-speed services.

Virgin compared ten broadband speedtests and argues that Thinkbroadband.com offers the only one capable of accurately measuring the speed of its forthcoming 50Mb/sec service.

Speedtest.net was the only other tester capable of accurately measuring 20Mb/sec services, Virgin claims.

The cable company says that the vast majority of web speedtesters don't have the bandwidth to cope. Consequently, they use payloads as small as 750KB to test the speed of the internet connection, which Virgin claims is too small to provide an accurate reading.

"Small payload files on fast connections can complete in a fraction of a second, so any delay due to traffic or congestion can form a large percentage of this time, resulting in a bad test," Virgin claims.

"Consumers are being misled," a Virgin spokesman told PC Pro. "The payload is far too small. On one site we were getting successive results of three meg, then five meg, then eight meg [from a 50 meg connection]."

Paying for payloads

Thinkbroadband.com's co-founder, Sebastian Lahtinen, says that many of the broadband comparison sites are not investing sufficiently in their speedtests. "Other speedtests have been designed with a small payload because they want to save on the bandwidth costs," he told PC Pro.

His site uses payloads of 128MB or more to determine the speed of a connection. "We do a very quick, limited test to first calculate the
speed of your line," he explained. "If you've got a mobile broadband connection, you're not going to download the full 128MB. If you're on an ultra-fast cable connection, you will."

However, Lahtinen cautions that just because Thinkbroadband's speedtest has recorded speeds approaching 50Mb/sec and 20Mb/sec on Virgin's lines, it doesn't mean that's the actual throughput customers are getting at home. "It [Virgin Media] has tested a line it knows is very good," he said. "Virgin knows our speedtest, as a system, is capable of measuring those speeds."

Virgin speed issues

Indeed, tests performed by Sam Knows Broadband earlier this year - which used dedicated router hardware to measure the performance of Britain's leading ISPs - revealed that Virgin's top-speed cable services don't always live up to expectation.

"Significant variation was seen between individual 20Mb/sec lines, with many running at 20Mb/sec during off-peak hours, but some dipped down to below 10Mb/sec," the report claimed, blaming the slowdown on contention and regional capacity issues.

Virgin says it's working with Sam Knows on the problems identified in the preliminary report. "We have an automatic upgrade process as soon as a regional network hits a certain capacity," Virgin's spokesman claims.

Author: Barry Collins