Broadband

[TheOak88]

Hi Everyone,

 

I am currently working from home and will be for the foreseeable future. I feel like my systems are quite slow though; a lot of delays when saving spreadsheets or files etc. 

 

I am with Virgin Media, and have been for the past 6 years. In that time I have never I have never upgraded my broadband. I called them today, and they confirmed I am on the M100 package which has speeds up to 100Mb/s.

 

They confirmed this is a pretty basic package and I could consider upgrading to M350, M500 or 1Gig per second package. 

 

I am pretty clueless about the stuff. Is there anyone on here that works in the industry that could advise? Would up grading to say M500 likely make a decent difference to the speed of my working systems?

[Tazio]

They're bullshitting you for a sales pitch. I've got the Virgin 100Mb and it's plenty fast for anything I need it to do, including streaming and downloading files. It's actually faster than companies like Sky manage for the so called super fast. 

[TheOak88]

3 minutes ago, Tazio said:

They're bullshitting you for a sales pitch. I've got the Virgin 100Mb and it's plenty fast for anything I need it to do, including streaming and downloading files. It's actually faster than companies like Sky manage for the so called super fast. 

 

Ah really. So you don’t think would make much difference if I upgraded it?. Just fed up with slow systems while working from home. 

 

Don't know if makes any difference but I log in through a VPN for work. Could that be the issue?

[The Internet]

100Mb is more than enough, provided you're actually getting those speeds. You can go to speedtest.net and run a test to see. Think it's still faster than any other company can offer in the UK and you won't notice a major difference by upgrading unless you're doing seriously heavy stuff. It's likely any slowness you're experiencing is at the company's end. 

[IronJambo]

The speed to your router is fine for anything if you have 100mbps.

 

That doesn't mean you'll get that to your devices if you're using WiFi. Quite a lot of variables in there. Distance to router, walls, what the device is capable of receiving etc.  If your speeds much slower through WiFi than what you're receiving your best bet would probably be to connect your devices via ethernet cables.

[TheOak88]

1 minute ago, IronJambo said:

The speed to your router is fine for anything if you have 100mbps.

 

That doesn't mean you'll get that to your devices if you're using WiFi. Quite a lot of variables in there. Distance to router, walls, what the device is capable of receiving etc.  If your speeds much slower through WiFi than what you're receiving your best bet would probably be to connect your devices via ethernet cables.

 

My laptop is in same room as router, they are only about a meter away from each other. I have got an Ethernet cable, tried it before but cannot say I noticed it making much of a difference unfortunately.

[TheOak88]

6 minutes ago, Mauricio Pinilla said:

100Mb is more than enough, provided you're actually getting those speeds. You can go to speedtest.net and run a test to see. Think it's still faster than any other company can offer in the UK and you won't notice a major difference by upgrading unless you're doing seriously heavy stuff. It's likely any slowness you're experiencing is at the company's end. 

 

Yeah I noticed when having a quick google that a lot of other providers didn’t seem to even offer 100mb/s. 

 

Yeah it may just be to do with the company unfortunately. It’s just really frustrating, was hoping that upgrading my broadband might be a relatively quick fix.

[Suffolk Jambo]

M100 means up to 100Mbps download, but your upload speed is more important when saving files. M100 has up to 10Mbps upload.

 

https://www.virginmedia.com/shop/broadband/speeds

 

Also agree about wifi connectivity. Run a speedtest before you connect to your VPN.

[TheOak88]

Is 10Mbs a bad upload speed, not sure how that compares in context?

[Suffolk Jambo]

It depends on the size of the file you are trying to upload, but 10Mb should be more than enough for spreadsheets and word documents.

[hughesie27]

11 minutes ago, Suffolk Jambo said:

M100 means up to 100Mbps download, but your upload speed is more important when saving files. M100 has up to 10Mbps upload.

 

https://www.virginmedia.com/shop/broadband/speeds

 

Also agree about wifi connectivity. Run a speedtest before you connect to your VPN.

Actually M100 means average speeds of 100MB. As is now standard for Broadband advertising. 

Everyone else is correct though, 100MB should be plenty. When you say slow do you mean in general, trying to stream YouTube etc, or is it only your work systems that are slow? If it is the latter the problem is more likely to be with whatever IT equipment your work uses rather than your Internet speed.

 

Go to Google. Search "speed test" and click run on the wee button that appears, then let us know your results. 

I am on the 212MB package with virgin and these are my current download and upload speeds. 

 

[graygo]

Are you saving the files and spreadsheets online or just to your laptop? If it's just to your laptop then your internet speed is immaterial.

[Ribble]

1 hour ago, TheOak88 said:

Hi Everyone,

 

I am currently working from home and will be for the foreseeable future. I feel like my systems are quite slow though; a lot of delays when saving spreadsheets or files etc. 

 

I am with Virgin Media, and have been for the past 6 years. In that time I have never I have never upgraded my broadband. I called them today, and they confirmed I am on the M100 package which has speeds up to 100Mb/s.

 

They confirmed this is a pretty basic package and I could consider upgrading to M350, M500 or 1Gig per second package. 

 

I am pretty clueless about the stuff. Is there anyone on here that works in the industry that could advise? Would up grading to say M500 likely make a decent difference to the speed of my working systems?

 

Probably more likely to be the speed/RAM of your laptop than your internet speed, I tend to turn off auto save and auto calculation if i'm working on big spreadsheets and then save once i've actually done something worth saving

[¼½¾]

You say you are connecting to a VPN. Are you connecting to a work network, saving those spreadsheets etc to their system? It might be that it's your work system that's throttling things, so what you do is immaterial.

Edited September 3, 2020 by Lemongrab

[TheOak88]

43 minutes ago, graygo said:

Are you saving the files and spreadsheets online or just to your laptop? If it's just to your laptop then your internet speed is immaterial.

 

So, for example any email I send to a client, I have to save that to an online platform.

 

So after sending an email, I will save it to a local file on my laptop (which is slow), then from there I will upload it to the online platform (again quite slow). 

 

When working in the office, tasks like the above are basically instant. When I work in the office I still use my laptop, I just plug Ethernet cable into the laptop in the office. Although I also do not have to use VPN when in the office. 

[hughesie27]

Sounds like you need a new computer. 

[¼½¾]

7 hours ago, TheOak88 said:

 

So, for example any email I send to a client, I have to save that to an online platform.

 

So after sending an email, I will save it to a local file on my laptop (which is slow), then from there I will upload it to the online platform (again quite slow). 

 

When working in the office, tasks like the above are basically instant. When I work in the office I still use my laptop, I just plug Ethernet cable into the laptop in the office. Although I also do not have to use VPN when in the office. 

In my last job, I could connect to my works system at home and have my work computer desktop on my screen, and I had access to their printers etc.  I had to connect using a virtual desktop program called Citrix. I have VM's M350, so everything online is usually very quick, but when I connected to this it was as very slow, comparably. If your laptop works fine when not connected to the VPN, that suggest to me that it's the VPN that's the problem, especially when you say you don't have any problem in your work when you don't have to use the VPN.  

[NANOJAMBO]

10 hours ago, TheOak88 said:

Hi Everyone,

 

I am currently working from home and will be for the foreseeable future. I feel like my systems are quite slow though; a lot of delays when saving spreadsheets or files etc. 

 

I am with Virgin Media, and have been for the past 6 years. In that time I have never I have never upgraded my broadband. I called them today, and they confirmed I am on the M100 package which has speeds up to 100Mb/s.

 

They confirmed this is a pretty basic package and I could consider upgrading to M350, M500 or 1Gig per second package. 

 

I am pretty clueless about the stuff. Is there anyone on here that works in the industry that could advise? Would up grading to say M500 likely make a decent difference to the speed of my working systems?

I used to work in IT and managed installations of new IT systems , including network switches and in all instances (and these were massive infrastructure projects on site of up to 1500/2000 users at a time) users were almost always operating on a 100Mb/s. I'd say if you are ACTUALLY getting 100Mb/s you are doing well and shouldn't really need anything else. 

 

The delays on spreadsheets etc are interesting - we used Excel a lot as a management tool (shared, large spreadsheets) and wehad what appeared to be network issues (ie slow) but it was app specific and not a network/bandwidth issue. 

[NANOJAMBO]

8 hours ago, TheOak88 said:

 

So, for example any email I send to a client, I have to save that to an online platform.

 

So after sending an email, I will save it to a local file on my laptop (which is slow), then from there I will upload it to the online platform (again quite slow). 

 

When working in the office, tasks like the above are basically instant. When I work in the office I still use my laptop, I just plug Ethernet cable into the laptop in the office. Although I also do not have to use VPN when in the office. 

Are you using MS Outlook ?  In all my years  I had to use VPN which took me into all corporate services and I never had to save emails locally. That doesn't make sense to me. If the emails have attachments you are taking up  a potentially huge amount of disk space locally.