Broadband speeds are 'never the top rate'.NO broadband customers are receiving the top download To receive a file transmitted over a network. In any communications session, "download" means receive, and "upload" means send. The download/upload often implies a big/little scenario, in which data is being downloaded from the "big" server into the "little" user's computer. speeds advertised by internet service providers (ISPs), the communications watchdog said yesterday. More than half of broadband users are on packages that offer speeds of "up to" 8 megabits per second (unit) megabits per second - (Mbps, Mb/s) Millions of bits per second. A unit of data rate. 1 Mb/s = 1,000,000 bits per second (not 1,048,576). E.g. Ethernet can carry 10 Mbps. (Mbps). But research by Ofcom Ofcom Noun (in Britain) Office of Communications: a government body regulating the telecommunications industries Ofcom n abbr (Brit) (= Office of Communications Regulation) → found in practice they received an average speed of 3.9 Mbps - less than half of the advertised maximum speed. Ofcom said it was impossible for customers to receive the so-called "headline speed" of 8 Mbps, because some capacity is reserved for technical reasons. The highest speed a customer on an 8 Mbps package could receive in practice is around 7.2 Mbps, Ofcom said. And this is only likely if they live extremely close to the telephone exchange through which their connection is routed. Fewer than one in 10 customers on an 8 Mbps package received an average speed of more than 6 Mbps, and around one in five received an average speed of less than 2 Mbps. Ofcom's six-month study involved more than 60 million broadband performance tests in 1,600 homes, and found the average broadband speed in the UK in April was 4.1 Mbps. |
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