The panorama of internet connections in Italy is quite complex in its uniformity. Thus it happens that the telephone line is all or almost all of a single company, Telecom or TIM, which owns the exchanges.
The other companies rent the so-called last mile of the telephone cable, to offer a personalized service to customers without being dependent on Telecom itself.
The name Unbundling Local Loop (ULL) (translatable as "unbundled access to the local network") also known as " liberalization of the last kilometer ", means the complete detachment from the owner of the cables, Telecom, to subscribe with another operator who becomes responsible for all purposes of the customer line.
There are therefore some operators, such as Fastweb and, in certain areas of Italy, also such as Vodafone and Wind, which are detached from Telecom by offering an independent ULL connection, and others instead who are only Telecom resellers and are also employees of it.
These differences in connection are often unknown to customers and never mentioned by the various vendors who would say anything in order to get the contract signed.
As can be seen by looking at the comparison between the best, most convenient, fastest and most reliable ADSL internet offers, prices hardly change due to the connection speed.
Due to its dominant position from the point of view of ownership of cables and power plants, the only operator that has different prices depending on the guaranteed internet speed is Telecom Italia, which today has changed its name to TIM.
Those who have TIM / Telecom 7 Mega could then ask themselves if it is worth switching from the 7 Mega offer to that of TIM or other operators that promise 20 0 30 Mega .
Basically it is important to understand if paying more you get a real increase in internet speed or if it is just a bluff.
READ ALSO: Italian ADSL operators; you are paying for the promised speed "> measure the internet speed by taking the ADSL test by discovering a speed not too far from the 7 mega promised in download.
If it is much slower then checks should be made to understand and resolve slow internet connection problems .
As written in that guide, it may be the fault of the computer, the router or the fact that the telephone exchange is far from our home.
Briefly, just access the router from the PC, check data such as Line Attenuation, the Synchronization speed ( Max Rate Kbps ) and SNR Margin (or Noise Margin ) and then go to the calculation site to actually know the real speed that Telecom or any other operator can offer to the maximum.
This type of test is purely indicative, but it can give a preliminary indication regarding the possible upgrade possibilities.
Basically, you can immediately understand if paying for more speed, you also get a major improvement in the uploading of the internet, videos and downloads.
You could then ask Telecom to remove the speed limits on your connection or, if possible, change and ask for the connection to another real operator such as Fastweb, Vodafone or Wind that have their own network (and they are not just resellers), if available the last mile in ULL mode as explained at the beginning.
With the other operators, only in the case of ULL, even if the 10/20 Mega will never be effective, you could actually gain speed without spending more .
In these cases, it is always worth abandoning Telecom .
Keep in mind, however, that for a normal and unprofessional user who uses one, two or three computers at home, getting a faster internet connection can be useless and the internet does not necessarily go faster.
The display speed of a website with a 7 Mega connection or a 100 Mega connection will, for example, be the same as, in theory, the viewing of high quality Youtube videos.
You can almost certainly experience a faster download speed with a faster connection, but only if it is direct and not limited downloads from the site that distributes that file.
The sellers and commercial consultants of the telephone companies can wave data and theoretical numbers as high as you want and it is true that the download speed can increase by 10 times without a theoretical limit, but everything then depends on the server to which you connect or, in simple words, from the sites you download from.
We wrote, in another guide, why the internet is slow at times and how to remedy by listing the main causes of problems.
Streaming video sites can definitely work better with fast connections.
Apart from Youtube which is optimized to offer the best quality even if the connection is not very fast, other sites such as those of Sky, Mediaset or RAI, may require a certain network bandwidth and a different type of optimization.
If this is the goal and with the 7 Mega of Telecom things do not seem to be going well enough, before changing try to speed up the streaming of the videos by changing some computer settings.
Finally, keep in mind that the Internet connection has two speeds that matter, that of download and that of upload.
Advertisements always talk about download speeds and never say how low the upload speed is, i.e. the speed with which you can upload something to a remote server.
As can be seen from the SpeedTest, this is almost always significantly slower than the download speed, but it is still very important.
The upload speed greatly influences the synchronization of files on Dropbox, online backup, uploading photos to Facebook, uploading videos to Youtube, sending attachments via Email and video calls with Skype.
So never forget to compare the upload speeds when looking for a better internal connection because in the end it could be the same even if you pay more.
If we talk about ADSL Telecom connections or with other operators (we don't talk about other types of internet connection such as satellite or wifi), paying for a higher speed is often useless.
The only case where it is decisive and almost mandatory to have the maximum is that of an office where there are many PCs, servers and devices connected to the internet at the same time.
