Internet speed

I noticed a thread in the pictures forum asking people to post their internet speed. I though it would be more interesting if the information was presented as a poll, so here goes. I'll set it up so that you can vote multiple times, as internet speeds do vary at different times. Any measurement is true only at the time it is taken.

Edit.... uh oh... it looks like I could not set it up for multiple voting; only multiple choice, that i didn't want. Oh well, we live and learn! Still, it will serve as a snapshot of the situation for these couple of weeks in Feb.

There is n phone line to my apartment, so mobile broadband is my only option. On a good day it runs at over 1 Mb/s, but of late it has been on a go slow, sometimes not even making 100 Kb/s. Today things got a bit better; it made 371 Kb/s

AQUADock said:

This should make you feel better . I really need to get a new service provider.
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For a moment.... back down to what has been the norm for the past couple of weeks! I have been using a HSPA based service mid 2012 when they discontinued the CDMA service that I had been using since 2007.

My first CDMA "dongle" was good for 152 kb/s max, but I seldom saw more than about a third of that. I replaced it with one that was promoted as being up to 3.2 MB/s (and a higher cost service). On a good day I would see over 1 MB/s. Typically it would be less than half that, but was quite usable for my purposes.

The HSPA, nominally up to 7.2 MB/s (but throttled to 385 kb/s after downloading 4 GB of data in any month) has been all over the place, from a fairly useful 1.5 MB/s, down to practically useless.

roadbloc said:

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The fastest our area is ever going to get since TalkTalk are the only people who cover it. When I enquired about a faster package I was told that our area hadn't even got cable, never mind fiber, so it was very unlikely we'd get a faster speed.

Hurry up 4G.

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I feel kind of lucky to have a mobile phone service. There is no phone line or cable service to the apartment block I live in.

Where I lived throughout 1981/82 we didn't have electricity, and the nearest telephone was about 20 km away. Snail mail from home took 3-4 weeks to reach an office in town, that I visited just a couple of times a month.

Going by the few respondents so far, there seems to be quite a divide between quite a few who have multi megabit internet service, and some who have fairly limited service. The idea of cloud computing, on-line OS up grades and some other services assumes availability of high speed internet service.

With relatively slow internet service even getting updates can take quite a while. To get an upgrade to Mountain Lion I had to take my computer to an Apple dealer, and pay a service charge, for a total of about $US 60, as I have no credit card, therefore no App Store a/c.

Given that there are over 1.000 responses to the "Post your Internet speed" thread, I thought there may have been some interest in this topic. But then I looked again, and saw that the thread has been going since 2008

It seems that there is something of a digital divide nowadays.

There are the "haves", with tens of MB download speed, and probably take it fairly much for granted.

There there are the "have nots", who get a MB or two on a good day, and down to just a few tens or hundreds of KB's on days that are not so good.