>>> I'm quite surprised that the tester was capable
thats one to bear in mind then, since some of the local ones on speedtest.net cant cope with my current upstream.
>>> you will note that the high figures are burst rates and not guaranteed in any case
In a way I can see what c6em is getting at, if you just look at that one page
link - without doing any further research, then it could be construed as misleading.
Unfortunately that page does not make it clear that the gb backlink will be shared between other users, once you get a few people connected then those speeds arent going to be seen. Even on other pages it just mentions "bursting at 1Gbps" and I found it hard to find mention of anticipated speeds based on contention.
When I did find it I notice it says "10+10Mbps reserved". It would be interesting to know how they are reserving the bandwidth, if they are just using contention ratios (100 users per gb backlink) without some sort of specialist traffic management, then real-time speeds could be much less than this. For example if you have a neighbour with 3 teenage kids using p2p they would eat into that link much more than someone streaming a HD movie, and streaming is first to see the effects of latency :/
Dont get me wrong, I think its absolutely fantastic that companies set up to do this sort of thing :clap2:, I just dont want people being mislead. About 8 yrs ago a company set up around here (Wyreless broadband) to provide broadband to an estate that couldnt get adsl due to TPON or aluminium (cant recall which now as we had one estate TPON and the other alum). Anyhow Wyreless bought a dedicated symmetric link which was then shared between the number of subscribing households on a contention ratio basis. Unfortunately it didnt take long before the link became saturated and it was impossible to attain anywhere near even the reserved bandwidth. Certain internet protocols are more 'greedy' than others and can grab more than their share, when it comes to contention.
Granted a Gb link has more bandwidth to play with than the old dedicated links of old, but its still something that should be born in mind. Good luck residents of Appleton. Well done