work broadband

We now hove a vaguely decent connection speed at work.

It's a weird package we're on, in that it's like a managed service.  This idea is that it has very little downtime, but you pay a premium for that and it really is expensive compared to most packages.

Quite how they guarantee that up time, given the reliance on the bits of the service being provided by BT, I'm not sure.  But what's also weird is that it didn't seem to be a low contention line.

Contention is basically when you have multiple people using the same line at the same time.  You get broadband because of bandwidth, which you get because they make use of multiple frequencies down the telephone line instead of just the one "blip and bloop" like you used to get with old fashioned modems.

Anyway, the idea is that the higher the contention, the mode the line is divided up and so the lower the speed everyone gets.  By having a service that guarantees low contention, you therefore ensure a good minimum speed.

For businesses this can often be more important that potential lofty maximum speeds.  If you're a business you're likely to be using your broadband during the day when lots of other people and business will be using there's, so guarantees over minimum speeds can be more useful.

However, this isn't a low contention line, but it is more expensive with guarantees about up-time - weird, as I say.

What they've done is basically given us access to the full capability of the line.  Previously it was fixed as a 512mb line and they've only just offered this as a free upgrade.

My guess is that actually, BT probably won't allow them to get a line restricted to 512mb any more, so they've had to offer it as a free upgrade.

The connection is a bit quicker.  I wouldn't say it gets anywhere near the claimed 8mb maximum, but then it never used to get anywhere near the 512mb it used to be.  We actually used to get something like 200mb, which is better than ISDN, but not greatly.

If I was to guess (I haven't done a speed check) I'd guess it's running at about 750mb, somewhere around there.  It's certainly a lot easier to use with much reduced waits for pages to load, but it's still not really able to cope with streaming video properly unless you allow it to buffer.

Obviously you've always had to do that, but before it would have to buffer the whole thing, but now you can set it going if it buffers half of it.

It is remarkable how much more pleasant the experience becomes though even with such a relatively modest jump.