Gadget Show - Not Good Enough!

How ironic. As part of their 'Gadget Show Truth' campaign, the Gadget Show on Five ran a piece this evening (20:45, 12 November 2007) on how badly ISP speed ratings seemed to compare to the 8Mbps we may be able to get (in theory at least). They quoted an URL to go to - http://five.tv/gadgetshow/ to test your broadband connection speed and enter the results into a giant consumer survey. Well, all I saw was a giant 'Service Unavailable' message. Clearly the site doesn't have enough bandwidth or computing power of its own.

When the page did eventually load, the Broadband Speed Test was still completely unavailable.

Quite how you can run a broadband speed test on a site that doesn't even respond is a bit of a mystery to me!

When I finally got the test screen to appear, it featured a speed tester from speedtest.net, and the test results gave me a download speed of 769kbps and an upload speed of 242kbps. I'd run a different speed test a few minutes earlier (the Facebook Broadband Speed Challenge) and recorded a download speed of 4753kbps. When I've run these tests previously on this internet connection it has always been above 4Mbps, so I find the five.tv offering entirely implausible. When I tried to run the test again, it just sat there, with status 'Connecting to lon.speedtest.net'.... no good at all!

Which Broadband ISP?

Have a look at my comprehensive list of broadband ISPs which ranks providers according to Speed, Reliability and Customer Service.

Note The Five.TV Broadband Speed campaign is now available as a series of online videos.

2008-03-14 17:24:47 John Hind says: "Tiscali download time was only 1.92 very poor as they boast up to 8"