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BT Wholesale speed tester - how does it work?

habile
Dabbler
Posts: 10
Registered: ‎04-02-2013

BT Wholesale speed tester - how does it work?

Hi,
Does anyone have any idea how the BT Wholesale Speedtest works? It tells me I have a download speed of 29Mbps and upload 1.6Mbps on my ADSL2+ connection... !?
I'm just curious - seems it is managing to use both of my connections combined? Shame I can't use channel bonding this way everywhere!!
Ta.
Chris
4 REPLIES 4
Bright
Grafter
Posts: 363
Registered: ‎02-02-2013

Re: BT Wholesale speed tester - how does it work?

You want to mind they don't charge you extra for breaking the speed barrier  Wink
My understanding is that it downloads and uploads files of a known size to/from your browser and measures the time taken to do it. Do you have two internet connections? If so how does your router handle them? If it load balances across the two connections, I guess it could indeed be routing some packets down one link and some down the other. Hence a result that's faster than a single ADSL2+ connection can handle. You could try disconnecting one before running the speed test.
habile
Dabbler
Posts: 10
Registered: ‎04-02-2013

Re: BT Wholesale speed tester - how does it work?

Yes, I do have two connections, one on LLU (TalkTalk) and one with PlusNet and they are indeed load balanced - I didn't think it was working that well but I guess it is Smiley
The speed checker must use multiple sessions however as there's no router in the world that can combine bandwidth at only one end!!
Guess I was just surprised that the BTW tool seemed so 'dumb'!
Thanks
C.
Bright
Grafter
Posts: 363
Registered: ‎02-02-2013

Re: BT Wholesale speed tester - how does it work?

Yes. I assume it works rather like a download manager - requesting multiple segments (or multiple files) in parallel in order to try and saturate the access link. Otherwise a single HTTP thread would act as the bottleneck at the browser. I guess all speedtesters work like that.
habile
Dabbler
Posts: 10
Registered: ‎04-02-2013

Re: BT Wholesale speed tester - how does it work?

Hmm.. that's not the behaviour I see with others, speedtest.net etc.
It's not really that important but slightly interesting and cheers me up a tad when I'm feeling blue to think that I have 30Mbps to play with Smiley