Virgin Vs. TalkTalk

I’ve spoken previously about TalkTalk (first online in Bristol, then Brighton, some recent problems and some more serious problems).
We finally had enough and decided to switch over to Virgin Media. Currently I have both copper and fibre running concurrently on different routers so I decided to run some Speedtests for comparison.

Saturday 13th June 2009, 00:10

Summary
(note: I’m drunk, so I might have the figures wrong. Do tell me if I have),

• Virgin download is 75% faster than TalkTalk.
• TalkTalk upload is 49% faster than Virgin.
• Virgin’s ping is 56% faster than TalkTalk’s.

I ran each speedtest twice.
Following is the detail.

Virgin:
Down: 8.16Mb/sec
Up: 0.31Mb/sec
Ping: 45ms (London, <50 miles)

Down: 8.01Mb/sec
Up: 0.48Mb/sec
Ping: 30ms (London, <50 miles)

Average,
Down: 8.085Mb/sec
Up: 0.395Mb/sec
Ping: 37.5ms

MP3 file: 5 sec
Video clip (35MB) 35 sec
Movie (800MB) 13 min

TalkTalk:
Down: 4.58Mb/sec
Up: 0.59Mb/sec
Ping: 68ms (London, <50 miles)

Down: 4.65Mb/sec
Up: 0.59Mb/sec
Ping: 67ms (London, <50 miles)

Average,
Down: 4.615Mb/sec
Up: 0.59Mb/sec
Ping: 67.5ms

MP3 file: 9 sec
Video clip (35MB) 1 min
Movie (800MB) 23 min