Does anyone know of any way of checking a broadband connection? ours is supposed to be 8meg (whatever that means!) but if my sons playing online it puts my computer to about the speed of a dial up, or if im downloading he cant play an online game. surely this cant be right

 

Sync speed is 5984kbps, decent throughput for peak time, can't download torrents on this at all during daytime though.

my mates got a 20 meg and between the hours of 4pm and 12 its bottlenecked to 2 fookin meg what a con

The thing about sharing your connection is pretty mis-understood. Its only cable (virgin/ntl,etc)that is shared with other users at the downstream side (the users end) at up to 50-1 or whatever. Its basically like an ethernet LAN in your neighbourhood.

If you are using ADSL it is a direct connection through your phone line to the ISP so you arn't sharing it with anyone. With ADSL its at the ISPs connection to the internet (the head-end I think its called, as mentioned above) which is massively oversubscribed. Your poor connection to the ISP is probably more down to the quality of the phone line.