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If you want fast data speeds dont live in Milton Keynes

old bill2old bill2 Posts: 689
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in Mobile Phones #1
A recent survey has found that Milton Keynes has on average the slowest mobile data speeds reaching around 1.7 meg. Peterborough was rated one of the highest with speeds reaching 3.6 meg. All I can say to that is that they did not survey my town. Average speeds around 800kbps.:(

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12977878

TEN SLOWEST TOWNS FOR 3G

Milton Keynes - 1.73Mbps
Leicester - 2.01Mbps
Huddersfield - 2.17Mbps
Cardiff - 2.18Mbps
Liverpool - 2.21Mbps
Blackburn - 2.23Mbps
Stevenage - 2.23Mbps
Hull - 2.35Mbps
Stafford - 2.37Mbps
Birmingham - 2.43Mbps

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    Thine WonkThine Wonk Posts: 17,190
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    #2
    All of those speeds are perfectly acceptable for a bit of browsing or streaming though. Sometimes I think we want too much, that's perfectly acceptable for mobile broadband.

    There are a lot of places where bt can't provide those speeds.
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    Adam792Adam792 Posts: 7,147
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    #3
    Stafford's on there too. :D To be honest I've never noticed it being particularly slow in Stafford at all on Vodafone anyway, and I agree with Thine Wonk, it's perfectly acceptable for browsing; some people want it to do everything.
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    thorvertonianthorvertonian Posts: 1,304
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    #4
    Be tahankful you get 3g! We still stuck on 2g here, but is perfectly fast enough for browsing
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    Thine WonkThine Wonk Posts: 17,190
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    #5
    That BBC article is a joke yet again its referring to a press release from a site selling broadband also the page load and app download times are completely wrong.

    They say " At 1.73Mbps it would take up to 10 seconds to load a webpage and over two minutes to download an app such as the popular Angry Birds game."

    I just don't think those figures are right. I bet its the same journalist who plugged top10.com's commercial operations last time, where the data was based on such a small amount of tests that it was useless and the site was mainly just a leader into selling mobile broadband anyway.

    More disgraceful BBC journalism again.
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    RoushRoush Posts: 4,368
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    #6
    Whilst I don't agree with the anti-beeb sentiments (and lets not get into that here...) I do agree this is flawed in a number of ways.

    When I looked on Top10.com's speed map about an hour ago there were only 11 results showing for Milton Keynes, which is nowhere a large enough sample size to mitigate anomalies in results and provide a credible reference point.

    Secondly the inclusion of the iPhone 3G in the results introduces potential anomalies as it is hardware limited to a maximum download speed of 3.6 Mbit/s, and just looking at the Milton Keynes results there are a number of tests that rated above this, including an O2 result of 5.0Mbit/s, from an iPhone 4.

    In short, don't pay much attention to this. The speed measurement is unscientific and flawed and the number of tests is insufficient to give a representative average.

    I also agree with what you alluded to in your first post, that there differences between the 'fastest' and 'slowest' average speeds noted is not something that would negatively impact the user experience.
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    zippydoodahzippydoodah Posts: 2,778
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    #7
    One thing's for certain, the cable tv in Milton Keynes is crud. Its still on analogue. No High speed here!
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    psionicpsionic Posts: 20,188
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    #8
    I read this earlier. The numbers come from a price comparison website. Based on results from a speed test in it's iphone app. Hardly definitive! http://www.reghardware.com/2011/04/07/uk_mobile_broadband_speeds/
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    unklesamunklesam Posts: 1,005
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    #9
    Slow 3G is better than no 3G, stuck on 2G here, not even EDGE, 2G only
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    KnightonKnighton Posts: 667
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    #10
    I can think of plenty of reason to not want to live in Milton Keynes, mobile broadband speeds being not even making the top 5 ;)

    But yes, I think the Beeb have over-egged this story a bit. For general browsing you're not likely to see much of a difference.
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    Thine WonkThine Wonk Posts: 17,190
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    #11
    Knighton wrote: »

    But yes, I think the Beeb have over-egged this story a bit. For general browsing you're not likely to see much of a difference.

    If that were the case I wouldn't mind so much, a bit of poor research or a lazy day by the BBC that's fine. But what they did is copy and paste a commercial press release from top10.com and use that as the basis for an article, even giving this site that sells mobile broadband free publicity funded by the licence fee.

    They just took the press release at face value and never even bothered to look in to the fact the headline figure was based on 11 test results all from 1 handset type, including iphone 3G, which only supports up to a theoretical maximum of 3.6 Mbit/s.

    http://top10.com/company/press/uk_s_worst_3g_locations_milton_keynes_in_broadband_slow_lane/
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