broadband speed

thetourist

i just got broadband installed and was wondering about the speed - i did a few checks on speed check websites and found differing results - then i called tech support at my isp and they said that if i tried to download a large file from ftp.heanet.ie and then looked at the rate of transfer and multiplied it by 8 that it would give me the best indication of the bandwidth of the connection - the speed i got was between 60 and 100 KB per second at various times of the day ( i suppose this is due to several people using the service ) - now he also said that my broadband service was contended at the rate of 24:1. so i am now trying to work out what is acceptable - i pay for a 2Mbit connection and if i was receiving 60KB/s at 6.30 in the evening , would that mean that i was getting 60*8 = 480kpbs or roughly quarter of the pipe - and given that it's a 24:1 ratio, then wouldnt that be quite good ? any opinions ? - i feel that if anything is wrong with the service that now is the time to complain. initially i thought that it was ridiculuous to get only quarter of the pipe but when you consider that it's shared then maybe i'm mistaken

the other questions/issues i have are that i was on the broadband one night at about 3am and i would have expected to get the full pipe at some stage around then beacuse i thought at least at some stage noone would be on but me - but i never got more than half - why is this ( i know that one obvious explanation is that i was not the only one burning the midnight oil but is this the most likely answer - or are my isp cheating me )

last question is this - it has occurred to me that because i am on a 24:1 ratio that maybe at the moment there are much less people on the pipe because there may be more to be added to it after the isp gets round to connecting them - is it a possibility that my speed could take a further dip and is there anything that i could do about it

ie my fear is that even if there were only 20 out of 24 on the net and that if even 4 of these were downloading large files that if each of these were getting the 480 kbps that i was getting there wouldnt be much left for anyone else - so i suppose the isp would not allow this to happen - which means that if I was one of the 4 trying to download a file i might get a very slow transfer rate

forgive me i am a bit of a greenhorn about these things but thanks for any help/opinions anyone has

ps fundamentally i am really trying to find out if my observations and calculations are correct or not

Hal1

Hi there,

You just answered your own question , yes you have a contented connection to your ISP 24:1 you say so the pipe is shared with 24 others including yourself.

Thats 24 hosts sharing 2mbit, sounds like your getting your fare share, there descent enough speeds. The speeds will fulctuate alot especially at peak times during the day. And it is rare to recieve the full bandwidth of the pipe.

Hope this clears some things up for you. It may be a good quality service at the moment but some ISP's as mentioned in some of the other threads have a 'cool off' period where they will throttle your connection usualy after a week or two, so that the bandwidth is shared equally among the other hosts.

Just something to watchout for keep an eye on the speeds your getting and do some benchmarks like the customer support suggested to you.

thetourist

thanks - that was very helpful - but why would they choke back the conection - what's in it for them unless they want to get away with putting more people on the pipe or giving a smaller pipe than advertised - or am is missing something

is there any way to check how many people are sharing the pipe with me - or what the contention ratio actually is


oh i forgot something in the original post - i think the ping rates are pretty slow - 56 to my gateway - 59 to dns and 95 to google.ie - are these slow and are they affected by other people on the pipe too or should i do anything about it??

Cuddlesworth

If its irish broadband, then you are getting better than a lot of other people.

optiplexgx270

im on IBB in dublin and get 180-240k 100% of the time depending on the server/site

if you care to give me a link to a file ill do a speed test now for you.

thetourist

optiplexgx270 wrote:

if you care to give me a link to a file ill do a speed test now for you.

thanks, how exactly will i do that ?

optiplexgx270

humm well ok i tested a file from the heanet server there and i was getting solid 245K download speed file was ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/iso/1.6/evbarmcd.iso


Edit: got the file in just under 9mins

thetourist

for me was about 105k - and said it would take 18 mins - didnt download it tho

optiplexgx270

could always call up but how are your pings by the way they can be more important than speed. If they are bad then complain otherwise i wouldnt worry. To test pings

Start - run - cmd

then in the command window do a:

pint -n 100 www.boards.ie


that well ping boards 100 times and then give you a summary.

thetourist

56 to my gateway - 59 to dns and 95 to google.ie

is this acceptable ??

is it affected or unaffected by number of people on pipe ??

optiplexgx270

i get averages of 4 to gateway 8 to dns 8 to boards.ie (strange that i get the same to dns and boards.ie i know) 29 to google.ie

but i do get a packetloss of 2-3% to most sites over a 100 ping session.

>10 to gateway is slugish in my mind as it is only from your rooftop to the mast. Traveling at the speed of sound over what <5miles.

Edit: and back again of course.

Not greatly affected by ppl on pipe at all.

Snaga

optiplexgx270 wrote:

>10 to gateway is slugish in my mind as it is only from your rooftop to the mast. Traveling at the speed of sound over what <5miles.

Edit: and back again of course.

Speed of light you mean! Sound is REALLY slow

dubadubdub

Can you get NTL in your area? If you can then I would recommend it, I've had it for two years without a hitch. I am currently on the 2mb package and I'm consistantly getting results of 1.94mbps when running speed tests. They have a contention ratio of 17:1 which never seems to slow the performance. This is not a sales pitch - just words from a very satisfied customer who will complain when needed but doesn't mind giving praise where it is due.

thetourist

<5miles.

worse - it's only about 200 metres away !!

dubadub - ibb is the only provider that i can get

can anyone tell me if pings are affected by the number of people on the net

optiplexgx270

Snaga wrote:

Speed of light you mean! Sound is REALLY slow

hehe i was on msn to a friend saying that to him as an afterthought too but i was just too damn lazy to come back in and change that even looked it up sound is 344meters a sec. it turns out.

watty

Speed of light is a bit slow at 300,000,000 meters per sec for satellite. A ping has to do 100K miles at least.

So Geosyncronous sat willl never ever work for real time online games...