Is your broadband as fast as you were told it would be?

On The Gadget Show on Monday night Suzi Perry and gang launched a campaign to get to the bottom of actual broadband speeds that customers are getting against what they are paying for. If you’ve noticed most service providers say that you can get up to 8Mb or up to 10 Mb bandwidth but that does not mean that you are actually getting that every time (or for that matter any time).

As Suzi explained it’s like driving on a 5 lane motorway – you can legally drive up to 70mph… there are the magic words again. But if it’s a bank holiday weekend and you are on the motorway at 5pm on a Friday evening, you’re going to find traffic and although you can go up to 70mph you’ll find yourself more at 40-50 mph. This is what happens when you connect to the internet – the bandwidth is the motorway and the traffic is, well, just that, other users. If this happens once in a while it’s understandable but if there is constant traffic on your ’super information highway’ then either they need to increase the lanes or charge you less for not providing you with the potential to use the 8/10 Mb bandwidth that they promised.

If you want to take part in this campaign and test out your speeds The Gadget Show have set up a page for you to do this and then to email them your findings so that they can use this to apply pressure on our internet service providers to give their consumers a better deal. Visit http://gadgetshow.five.tv/ and try it out for yourself.