Nezz10

Just taken up the special offer of starter tv package and 2Mb broadband for £15 a month. Its nice to have a larger selection of tele channels and improved signal overall.

With it being digital tv I thought that the quality of the picture would be really good but sometimes it get very blocky when watching fast moving pics like the F1 for example or close ups of people when they move. Did a search and it looks like I am not the only one. Just thought I would bring this to the attention of anybody considering taking up the same.

Oh yea and the fastest my 2Mb internet has been so far is 542kbps so far, running at 397.2kbps right now. I know its "up to" 2Mb but thought it would be closer to the advertised figure.

Nevermind, at £15 a month I can live with it!

EXSCOOBY

right
use a good quality scart none of that argos nonsense
set it up properly in the menu is scart rgb
and do a bandwidth test on the tinternet

Dracoro

The blocky bit is 'normal'.

Check out BBC1, BBC2, ITV1 and C4. See how they're great quality but all the 'extra' channels are lacking somewhat. There's X amount of bandwidth to send the signals down so the more channels etc. that are broadcast, the less 'bandwidth' per channel so quality deteriorates. The normal terrestials above have more bandwidth 'reserved' for them.

Not 100% sure but that's how I think it works.

ben44

They have a certain amount of bandwidth for each area/road. Try logging on at 4 or 5 in the morning. It will be fast as ****. Log on again 12 hours later when all the school kids are getting in and you'll be back to 1/2 a meg.

Most providers are the same, for instance, my BT 2.2 meg is currently at 288kbps But that is TRANSMITTING speed, Receive speed is around 2270kbps which isn't to bad. Are you looking at the right speed? Mine is displayed as 288/2272 which does kinda imply its running slower.

Dracoro

542k is good, that's over 3MB connection speed. 400k is about 2.8Mb. Depends on the upload speeds as to how much is available for download speeds.

EDIT: I thought you were talking download speeds so the above may be wrong. So if you're downloading a file at 400k a sec then that's good!

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Yep welcome to the "digital age"

Scart lead won't help your blocky picture, but helps with any grainyness, distortion and crosstalk (avoid the massively overpriced monster stuff). But make sure your box is set to ouput RGB not Composite/Video.


I think your mixing up MegaBITS with MegaBYTES (8 bits in a byte, 1024 bytes on a kilobyte, 1024 kilobytes in a Megabyte etc). You have 2megabits per second broadband, that works out at around 256Kilobytes per second, So your doing ok.

HankScorpio

Just to balance, I've got Telewest 4Mb (recently free upgraded from 1) and regularly do the ADSL guide speed test and have never been very far from the theoretical maximum.

SiDHEaD

Sounds like something's wrong with your net connection. Everyone I know gets full quoted speed on their cable modem!

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

I 've just ran a few diagnostics on my 1Mb Blueyonder.

the results were an average download speed of 964Kbps (kilobits). Slightly short of the rated 1024kbps.


Which works out about right as My avarage download speed shown on the microsoft download windows (measured in kilobytes) hovers around 120kB/s (kilobytes)

ozzy

As a rough guide, downloads speeds are approx. :-

60kb/sec = 512Kb broadband
120Kb/sec = 1Mb
240Kb/sec = 2Mb
500Kb/sec = 4Mb
1000Kb/sec = 8Mb
1200Kb/sec = 10Mb

As for Digital TV, the blockyness is a typical trait. With analogue, the signal can just get grainy or show static when the signal drops. Digital is on/off, so the picture breakdown is shown as the block patterns.

Stefan