technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6169488.ece

Too many users using too much bandwidth seems to be the problem.

they just boosted our speed to 100 mbps.  I think the deal was that they expected everybody to wanna download vids, but how does the visual quality of a downloaded thing compare with an HD DVD?  my assumption is that it would be so heavily compressed that it wouldn't be worth downloading.

A number of service providers in my area are restricting bandwidth for video on demand / downloads because its costing them a lot to support.

Same in the UK as well. I've seen some of my customers who download a lot complaining their download speeds are terrible. Sometimes lower than dialup. But if you ask the ISP's they won't say that, they just say theres lots of people in your area. Thats been one of their regulars for years
    
One of my favourite excuses when working tech - back in the days of dialup - was to say there where too many birds sitting on the telephone lines :)

Then again consider what the net used to be like ...
50 quid a month plus, no free calls or local rate calls.

On my first connection there was only so many nodes avaliable outside London.
Portsmouth was the nearest, but that only had 3 numbers to dial in on. So when you wanted to go online you'd call around other people and ask who was going online!

Quote - they just boosted our speed to 100 mbps.

Just  now?!

I've had high speed DSL with my phone company since March 2000 and have always had 100 mbps.  In September 2000 they maxed out their capacity and my service was down more than it was up.  They scrambled to fix the problem.  Now the service is pretty good.  There are times it goes down, but it's not frequent.

However, after having DSL for so long, it now seems slow to me and I keep pestering my phone company to increase the speed!!  LOL

The only real problem that I've had with them was regarding their caching of files.  At one time they only cleared their cache once every 2 weeks or so, which meant that between them and the cache of my website host, I often didn't see the changes that I made to my website for 3 or 4 days.  After repeated whining and ranting to both places, the phone company started clearing their cache more often and my web host added a feature where we could delete the cache manually up to 3 times per 24 hour period.

Quote - they just boosted our speed to 100 mbps.  I think the deal was that they expected everybody to wanna download vids, but how does the visual quality of a downloaded thing compare with an HD DVD?  my assumption is that it would be so heavily compressed that it wouldn't be worth downloading.

You'd actually be quite surprised by the quality of downloadable videos these days.

I've heard that you can download full HD quality copies of videos (without the added DRM) if you know where to look, I don't know where to look though.

im just outside London and the maximum i can get is 8mbps, i wish we would get 100mbps but the network round here is out of date and will probably stay like that for the next 50years...lol

I don't think Acadia had 100 Mbps - that was the connection speed between her PC and the modem - 100 Mbps Ethernet. To get that kind of speed to the home, you need fiber. I have fiber (Verizon FIOS) at home, but it is limited to 20 Mbps. You can pay more for the 50Mbps connection, but 20 is plenty fast enough for me. Most websites I'm downloading from will not actually send me data that fast.

Attached Link: End of the Internet

Sir Tim Berners-Lee???? I thought it was Al Gore that launched the internet hehehehehehe.

When I lived in Southern New Hampshire we had the Fios service and I have to say it's pretty awesome and the 20 Mbps was plenty fast enough for me. As bagginsbill pointed out your ISP provider may be giving you top speed but that means nothing of the webpages you visit isn't kicking out the same rate or close to it. It's liken to having a super, tricked out, high perfomance sports car but you can only drive it on streets with posted speed limits that will never test the real horsepower of the car.

Now that I am in Missouri we are back to a plain old cable connection (Fios was fiber optic) and they have us a 8 Mbps heck we don't even get a HD signal from the cable service out here. Hence what is the use of having a HDTV when cable company doesn't even have an HD signal. Thank goodness for our HD DVD player...LOL!

Quote - I have fiber (Verizon FIOS) at home, but it is limited to 20 Mbps. You can pay more for the 50Mbps connection, but 20 is plenty fast enough for me. Most websites I'm downloading from will not actually send me data that fast.

I have Verizon FIOS too, and that is plenty fast for me. As you said most sites won't let you download that fast (or upload). I do love FIOS after having DSL. :)

the dsl techs here said it would be 768 kbps for me, so I didn't go for that.  other than the speedtest servers, daz and sharecg have fast servers.  I downloaded the daz 8981_2_dpc_AntimatterContainer_2.zip at 1.3 MBps, which, if 10 bits per Byte (start bit, 7 data bits, parity bit, stop bit) would be 13 mbps.  the speedtest.net servers showed approx. 15.46 MBps on monday.  I am unsure if it's 10 bits per Byte or 8, when downloading via http.

You (and I) are old and so we talk about start bits and stop bits and parity bits. But, modern networks don't use those. That's from the old async serial line protocols.

On high speed lines, a byte is really 8 bits, period. (Note also that the 7 data bits you spoke of is only good for ASCII, not a binary data byte) However, on packet switched networks (such as IP) there is header info and a CRC, as well as MAC headers. Usually, this runs to around 40 bytes of overhead per packet. With typical packet sizes of 16K bytes, the 40 bytes of overhead is noise.

Also, we are in a full-duplex world now, so the extra conversational overhead of acknowledgements and so on is effectively zero, especially with piggy-backed ACKs.

The bottom line of all this is that you can convert bits per second = bytes per second times 8 and that's pretty close to correct.

(Note: I used to be the Chief Engineer of a vendor of network routers, switches, and interface cards. Also, I wrote the TCP/IP stack for DEC. Long live the PDP-11!)

Quote - Long live the PDP-11!

Yay, PDP! I was very fond of the VAX, too. My first experience with multi-tasking and Unix. 

Ah, the good old days.

Oh for the good old days of going online with a Commodore 64 or an Atari...  A blazing 9K!  The Compuserve sub was like $25 for a few hours, it was all text...  But that came in faster sometimes than what I get now with my super-Dsl, LOL!

oops! I erred earlier in saying speedtest.net was 15.46 MBps.  it was actually 15.71 Mbps, so apparently they aren't gonna gimme 100 Mbps until I pay 'em extra :crying:
p.s.: those were the days! here's a snap of some guy's grampa next to one of those early computers

 Aaaah, the good ol' PDP-11...those were the days.... a third of the people in the lab there solely because they kept it so cold that every nipple in the room was desperate to escape. That soothing sound as if a dozen unsynched mike feeds from Flatley's 'Lord of the Dance' were playing from the dumb terminals. That wonderful smell of shredded paper and the machine gun slam and chatter from the tty stations. The shriek of horror if -any- non geek got within arm's length of the magic box from the sys admin. The punch cards that bored clued users made ascii porn on. All the illicit games of Star Trek in progress as the presumed IT teacher droned on about magic boxes and Venn diagrams and the proper way to begin to think about using a real language, like cobol or fortran, over the more populist nonsense out there. Watching the 'techs' trying to get the archive disk drives up and running after the idiots let the stupid things slide down a stairwell.......

The banshee-like wail coming from the sub-basement at 3:00 in the morning as some poor caffeine-drenched student tripped in the hallway and his box of carefully collated punch cards with no line numbers was spilled into oblivion on the floor...

Massive hard drives that looked like washing machines that held a whopping ten megabytes of data...

Oh, and remember punch card Christmas wreaths? Everybody would fold 'em and arrange 'em into a circular fan and spray paint 'em gold? Geek heaven, it was.

Quote - oops! I erred earlier in saying speedtest.net was 15.46 MBps.  it was actually 15.71 Mbps, so apparently they aren't gonna gimme 100 Mbps until I pay 'em extra :crying:
p.s.: those were the days! here's a snap of some guy's grampa next to one of those early computers

*<Psst... MN, not to spoil the humor, but you do know that image is a pre-Photoshop photo fake made for some contest or other a while back? You did? Sorry, just checking...>

:biggrin:*

 I think the apple logo below the screen and the steering wheels give it away....

o.k., then - apparently  vaxes and pdp11s didn't have steering wheels nor apple logos.  altho the historical record is unclear as to whether their predecessors may have had steering wheels. :lol:

Speaking of those round things at the end of axles and steering columns...

Back at my alma mater, way back when, we used to tell newbs in the computer lab that the appendages at the bottom of the monster line printer were "training wheels" to keep the computer from "crashing".

It was so much easier to play with peoples' minds then.

100 Mbps is a lot different to 100 MBps.

In fact, 100 Mbps = 12.5 MBps.

So you might want to make sure you're reading this right.

1 Megabyte = 8 Megabits.

So 100 MBps (100 megabytes per second) would be 800 Mbps (800 megabits per second)

Make sure you have the right numbers, because I don't think you are getting 100 megabytes a second. Megabits, yes, but not megabytes.

Very misleading and something the ISP's know people don't understand.

Quote - The banshee-like wail coming from the sub-basement at 3:00 in the morning as some poor caffeine-drenched student tripped in the hallway and his box of carefully collated punch cards with no line numbers was spilled into oblivion on the floor...

Massive hard drives that looked like washing machines that held a whopping ten megabytes of data...

Oh, and remember punch card Christmas wreaths? Everybody would fold 'em and arrange 'em into a circular fan and spray paint 'em gold? Geek heaven, it was.

And remember the utter look of terror on the admin's face when he walked in and a couple of weiners had that precious, four digit stack of metal platters out of its protective sleeve and -exposed to the dirty air-...? And poking a pencil into the drive box, just about where those read write heads parked. And those wonderful  tape backups that were about 25 millimeters, depended on negative air pressure to ride in the transport, and when the gentle suction failed and the spools jerked =once=.......... Whizzzzzz-grind-shredshredshred-chunkOhMyGodThe MasterArchivalBackupisInThat^&%(^)(%&()^()&()&(&&%^((*^&^$$%^%$#%$*Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!!

And people complain today about how clunky current computers are........? Put'em on the floor before an '11, give em a logic probe, analyzer, and a wire wrap tool and let em hunt down the broken wire or messed up 74LS chip...=without= blowing every static sensitve CMOS chip on the plane, thankyewveddymuch....  >:P

hmmmmmmmmm ...
I have 10Mbps service...I've neve seen a download faster than about 500Kbps ... ever...anywhere.
My dl is set at 2.5Mbps

I'm thinking , though, that the hype is starting about the badwidth so we don't feel bad when they throttle and charge for time. Its amazing the ips haven't started this a long time ago to squeeze every dime they can get from us. Bandwidth does cost money, but wha ti sthe capacity really?

Quote -
Whizzzzzz-grind-shredshredshred-chunkOhMyGodThe MasterArchivalBackupisInThat^&%(^)(%&()^()&()&(&&%^((*^&^$$%^%$#%$*Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!!

Oh please, don't go there! I used to have recurring nightmares about that kind of stuff!
The first computer I worked on still had cards. And I remember dropping a box full.
O-M-G.
I think bleach wouldn't get anything as white as I went that day, seeing all the cards strewn over the floor and falling down the stairwell... knowing the windows were open and praying none of them took the diversion route out of one lol.

dave, try speedtest.net, which should show a speed of at least 50 - 75% of whatever yer paying for.  daz and sharecg are also very fast, at times (OS X, airport extreme).  YMMV.

thanks...tested...I average 7.5Mbps on a 10Mbps line. Upload is .98Mbps ... this is actually above average for my ISP, and above average for the US

Quote - hmmmmmmmmm ...
I have 10Mbps service...I've neve seen a download faster than about 500Kbps ... ever...anywhere.
My dl is set at 2.5Mbps

I've gotten speeds of up to about 2 MB/s when downloading a new game through Steam, but that's the fastest consistent download connection speed I ever see. I rarely exceed 1 MB/s even though Comcast claims I should get 5 MB/s. Yeah, right, as long as a server is dishing it out that fast, maybe, but that's pretty rare.
Sometimes when I go to download a new Nvidia driver, the first 20 or so MB will download almost instantaneously, which I really don't know how to explain, and then back off to around 1 or 1.5 MB/s for the rest of it.

But yeah, the ISPs lie through their teeth. I'm amazed at all the complaints I hear from people wondering why they're not actually downloading stuff at 10 MB/s. The ISP ads on TV and the radio never seem to mention that you can only download as fast as a server is giving it to you...

I get about an average of 8-12 MB/s on those internet speed test sites...as if that really means anything in the practical world.

Quote - (Note: I used to be the Chief Engineer of a vendor of network routers, switches, and interface cards. Also, I wrote the TCP/IP stack for DEC. Long live the PDP-11!)

Cool. Hat's off to you.

Charter Cable in Southern California...

I am at 10MBps (MegaBYTES) and that's quite good. They have 20 to offer, but it has not quite reached my area yet. I might not go for the upgrade because of the bottleneck of destination sites not uploading very fast as stated above.

FIOS is blocked out of my area by a political maneuver by Charter. Can't get it.

::::: Opera :::::

I tired that speedtest thing Nancy suggested and I'm getting 2.8 Mpbs per second.

Winterclaw is a sad chocobo.

http://speedtest.net

download: 10.57 mb/s
upload: .93 Mb/s
from a server near me in Los Angeles

download: 5.67  mb/s
upload: .97 Mb/s
from Florida

For whatever reason my system was crawling on the new a couple of days ago, wouldn't even open a generic page without taking 30 seconds...now it's blazing away again.

Quote - Charter Cable in Southern California...

I am at 10MBps (MegaBYTES) and that's quite good. They have 20 to offer, but it has not quite reached my area yet. I might not go for the upgrade because of the bottleneck of destination sites not uploading very fast as stated above.

FIOS is blocked out of my area by a political maneuver by Charter. Can't get it.

::::: Opera :::::

Not that it matters, but I don't believe you. Charter's "high speed" internet clearly states 5 Mbps (mega BITS per second) or 10 Mbps or 20 Mbps.

http://www.buycharter.com/internet.aspx

Look again. If you can get 20 MegaBYTES per second, which is 160 Mbps, guaranteed, for anything less that $16,000 a month I will be astonished.

Gods, what a horrible article. Either the guy is totally clueless about modern technology and computers, in which case i despair for the quality of technical writing in popular media, or a sockpuppet for some ISP. One of those crappy ones who oversubscribe their bandwidth 100:1 then whine when people actually try to use what they pay for.

Reminds me of this strip by the PennyArcade guys:

LOL!!

This is my speed test.
ISP is BT.

I am on ADSL, which means my upload speed is a fraction of my download speed.
We have ancient copper wiring here too, so all in all... this isn't too bad.

BB sorry you don't "BELIEVE" me....I simply have the terms mixed up.

Whatever the 'frige they are called, bits or bytes, I am
downloading 10.57 mb/s
upload: .93 Mb/s

and that's all I care about. It's decent.

::::: Opera :::::

I found I couldn't get more than 9400 mi. from anywhere.

jack must be a millionaire - he's paying for more than 20 Mbps! :lol:

Quote - 21 ? WOW...that's pretty nice...upload is very impressive CaptainJack

Thanks, I've always been quite proud of it-- wait... did you mean the Internet connection? Umm, yeah, of course you did. I knew that.

:biggrin:

Quote - jack must be a millionaire - he's paying for more than 20 Mbps!

Possibly, but a million of what, now? If the nice people at MasterCard think I've got money, they'll stop buying me all those nice toys...

Coldrake

Well, that's a switch... I'm getting less download, then upload. Verizon is supposed to be 20.0Mb/s
and upload is supposed to be 5.0 Guess I can't complain.

Quote - Long live the PDP-11!)

Dude, you are old. It was all MicroVAXen in my day.