Broadband Contention Ratios

Want to sign up to a broadband provider but are feeling a bit daunted? Broadband Essentials is the answer for you…

Broadband contention ratios
To make ADSL more cost effective BT ADSL services are ‘contended’ (shared). The usual contention ratios are :

Home 50:1
Business 20:1

This contention is applied within the BT network both locally with other users on your telephone exchange and within the BT network as it connects into your providers network.

What this means in the 'worst case' is that you could be sharing a 500 Kbit/s connection with up to 49 other users. So if they were all using it at the same time 'theoretically' you would only get 10 Kbit/s (not very fast at all - in fact quite a bit slower than a normal modem).

However, 'in reality' this scenario is very unlikely to happen and you should usually find it to be far faster than a modem connection.

ADSL relies on individual users not making unreasonable traffic demands on the network to provide fast access speeds for all.

This is why business broadband costs more than home use broadband as there are fewer users to share the line with.

Remember if you are not getting the speed you expect it can be due to the contention ratio but also to many other factors including the capacity of the remote site you are accessing, the quality and length of your telephone line from the local BT exchange.

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UK Online supply a contention ratio of just 33:1 on all of their broadband packages provided over their own broadband network, which reaches more than 4.4 million homes across the UK.

Click here for more details on UK Online Broadband

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