Thursday, 21 July 2011

Broadband speed mapping

The Broadband Cumbria project is trying to establish where the hotspots and, more importantly, where the notspots - those places which do not get decent broadband speeds - are, and want your help to map them. Here in Burton some of us get good broadband speeds whilst others struggle to reach 1Mbsp or 2Mbps speeds, so to help work out a broadband map of the parish if you are in the Burton exchange area we'd like to ask you to take a speed test and then report the results to us.

It's simple to do: all you need is to visit http://www.speedtest.net/wave/01a36521cdd24e04 and click the big button that says JOIN THIS SPEED WAVE and when it loads the test screen click the BEGIN TEST button on the left. The test will start and run a ping, a download and an upload test, and then show your results on the Speedwave page. (Note: due to the way that determining your location works it probably won't show Burton - ours shows London! but don't worry about that, it's more to do with where your ISP connects to the internet infrastructure  rather than where you connect to the internet!)

Once you've run the test please make a note of the ID number you've generated alongside your results and post a reply below along with a general indicator of where in the exchange you are - e.g. Main street Burton, Vicarage Lane Burton, Drovers Way, Dalton village, Clawthorpe, or if you're in Holme, Priest Hutton or Yealand  etc... then we'll start to build up a picture of speed variations across the exchange area.

The Speedwave will run for a while so as to give as many people as possible time to test their connections.

Please only add your results to the Burton exchange Speedwave if you are connecting from a phone line on the Burton Cumbria exchange - i.e. one which commences 01524 78xxxx or you'll skew our figures, thank you!