As more of us get our B4RN broadband connections (including both Rathmell Old School and the Reading Room yesterday!), one of the first things that you do with all this new-found speed is… a speedtest.
The Resources section of B4RN’s website has lots of useful information for customers (on things like phone / VOIP, streaming TV and films, SmartTVs, router settings and WiFi signal strength) and they also provide some useful pointers and reminders about speed tests, the first of which is:
if you can stream live video you are doing fine and don’t need to
do all this
But, human nature being what it is:
To summarise, for best speed results
- a wired Ethernet connection between the B4RN router and your computer will be much faster than a WiFi signal
- if your computer is middle-aged or old, it will be slower than a nice fast new computer
- you should use the Ookla app to test your connection speed rather than a browser-based speed test (e.g. a page or tab loaded in Chrome/Safari/Firefox/IE/Edge/…)
Unless you have a new and fast computer connected by ethernet cable into the B4RN router, you may struggle to get a speed reading as high as the 948Mbps upload and download that we saw in Rathmell School yesterday.
At these levels, a speed test is really testing how fast your device / computer can go, rather than measuring the actual throughput of the B4RN connection.
But… if you have three devices that will run at 300Mbps then you should be able to have all three go at that speed at the same time.