Faster boadband

I am so sick and tired of the broadband service provided by TalkTalk and the previous provider AOL, was no better. That's not surprising as a survey by price-comparison site uSwitch.com indicated that many broadband customers in the UK are dissatisfied with the service offered by their current provider. So I was really happy when I read about BT's plans to invest in super-fast broadband.

How fast you ask? Well they plan to have top speeds of up to 100 Mb/s with the potential for speeds of more than 1,000 Mb/s in the future.However, I realised that I might not be around in the UK to enjoy that kind of speed. Anyway, the £1.5 billion programme to give up to 10 million homes access to fibre by 2012.

People keep on asking me for recommendations for a good broadband provider. I don't really have any idea but according to the Moneysupermarket.com, O2 is the best broadband provider followed by Sky and TalkTalk.

I am not really sure about the third provider. However, what really surprised me was their finding that customers taking slow 2MB/s deals are actually receiving faster download speeds than those advertised. I am tempted to shift to Sky after reading this. I actually would have but I am tied down to TalkTalk by a contract for approximately another 10 months.

Check out the full news release by BT: "BT plans UK’s largest ever investment in Super-Fast Broadband".

Testing out the 3 mobile broadband service

Finally got the chance to give the 3 USB modem a good test run. I am blogging this via 3's mobile broadband service.

I shut of the wireless network in my house and used the dongle to connect to the net.



The first thing I did was to check the connection speed. Here are the results according to Speedtest.net:



The speeds are nothing to boast about but I look at the possibilities - it's amazing to think that I can access the net from almost anywhere in the UK. According to the 3 website, their "network covers 86% of the UK population."



Found this old picture of my son (3.2 MB) in my computer. Uploading it to my Flickr page took around 10 minutes.

Next test area: Nottingham.