Cyan

Just wondering because it seems to be a labour of love just to get a decent streaming connection to Skype / WhatsApp video messaging / other that doesn't pixelate/drop halfway. I have to prep my relatives in advance that I will be calling (they could also be social media tool shy, but that is a different matter).

I also noticed on a trip over in 2015 that broadband/high speed over there isn't what it's supposed to be.

Okay rant over.

Shard

Haven't had any problems like that since the late 90's.

Atlantic Xpat

It certainly seems to be behind Canada IME. We were one of the first areas to get fibre to the home with connectivity >50Mbps easily achieved. By contrast my parents in ruralish Norfolk only had 2mbps ASDL. Of course their belief that everything in England is superior to Newfoundland, meant that any problems clearly had to be my end, not theirs. Strangely, now they have much faster broadband those issues have gone away and FaceTime is a breeze. 😉

Of course where the UK does excel over Canada is in the cost of your internet connectivity.... which seems to be about 1/3rd of what we pay!

christmasoompa

Ours was slow more recently than that, but I suspect anybody that thinks the UKs broadband is rubbish is rather out of date. Given how fast they're rolling our superfast (even our little rural Berkshire village has max speed of 300 Mbps), in the past 2 years it's gone from a small percentage to I think over 90% of the UK having it now.

bats

Our internet here is rubbish, Bell and supposedly high speed but it's rubbish at streaming. If I compare that to my mums' internet hers is better. I put it down to semi rural vs a more populated area.

Novocastrian

This. Just this.

scrubbedexpat091

Can't say if ours is good, it works, and streams okay most of the time with some hiccups at times.

Download 17.03 Mbps and 1.60 upload, no idea what this would be considered though, but seems to work okay most of the time, just a bit pricey in my view, internet now costs more the cable TV.

Atlantic Xpat

Not good - and least not on the upload. By way of comparison I just did a speed test of mine and have 83Mbps down and 93 up!

scrubbedexpat091

Fastest Shaw offers is Up to 150 down and up to 15 up. $105/month for normal price.

That is their top tier internet.

We have 2nd to worst tier @ 70/month.

Telus offers up to 150 up and up to 150 down for $85/month on a 2 year plan.

Telus however wan't high deposit so they are not option for us.

BristolUK

Ours was always pretty good while plenty on here complained and that was before we went fibre optic (as Atlantic Expat mentions) when it became even better. I don't really know what all the figures mean...it doesn't seem important when you can see how quick it was and then even quicker and when it's unlimited why worry about figures?

But because plenty on BE, in Canada, have complained I wouldn't assume it was all great everywhere.


In another thread I posted High-speed broadband to be legal right for UK homes and businesses

Someone must surely be unhappy about it in the UK though if legislation is considered necessary

Shard

We're in the SE on the standard Sky broadband which is 17 Mbps which seems more than adequate. The fiber is up to 76 Mbps.

There probably more rural parts of the country on slower internet.

BristolUK

Probably all those damn beards causing interference

Vulcanoid

In theory my internet is 3x faster in Winnipeg than it was in Bristol, for which I pay 5x as much. Since I'm not in the habit of downloading wide array astronomical telescope data, the extra 100mb/s isn't as helpful as the extra cost is noticeable.

That said, we did a double take when comparing plans, and seeing some Canadian cable companies still have *monthly data caps* - thought they'd gone out shortly after dialup! So were obviously limited to plans that didn't have that.

If you were trying to Skype home on Christmas, you'd likely have had a bad connection anywhere in the world, as half the planet was using it! (We had poor connections to other parts of Canada, Europe, and Africa)