Broadband Provider Speeds

s*t*a*r*m*a*n

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Hi thought i would start a new thread on broadband providers. I am on 1.5 meg cable broadband from blueyonder. They have just upgraded from 1 meg to 1.5 meg for the same price so its 50% faster than it was. I think they did the upgrade when my modem went off and reset other night. I was running some file sharing software at this time and after the reset i noticed that i got a tremendous speed increase for about 15 minutes which i have never had since. I got literally 4 megs a second and i calculated that i downloaded a 685 megabyte file in 13 minutes which is fantastic BUT now im getting much much less, i get about 20kbs average and maybe hitting 170kbs a sec but i think on a 1.5 meg it should be about 180kbs max roughly. Is there anyway of getting those speeds again that i was getting for a short time? does anyone have any similar stories to share or suggestion? these broadband fixes don`t seem to do much as obviously they have capped my download speeds but it made me realise that my modem is capable of soooo much more :rolleyes:
 

PoloMint

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On a 1.5MBit cable connection 146kbytes is about the maximum speeds you should see. Anything more than that and you are running at more than 1.5mbit. (if my calculations are correct)

Remember also that 1.5Mbit is your total transfer speed, if you are receiving a file at 100kbytes a sec you are actually transferring quite a bit more than 100kbytes a sec, things like TCP headers and confirmation packets and so on all eat up your bandwidth, sometimes up to 10% of your connection can be TCP overhead, bandwidth you use but never actually see. So if you see a 170bytes/sec actual file transfer you are doing very well for a 1.5mit connection, either exceeding your cap or the program that is telling you this is not accurate.

Getting fantastic speed just after they increased your connection was, like you say, probably just Blueyonder sorting out your cap, and now that it is in place there is not much you can do to increase it, except pay for a faster connection.
 

drag0nfly_69uk

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i thought i was seeing things, i've 177kb i thought "oh, that must be glitch in the system!! can't be right, it would make 1.5mb"
 

s*t*a*r*m*a*n

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Thanks for that :)
i think it works out roughly 60kbs a sec for each half meg upgrade based on my observations. I was getting 60kbs max roughly on a half meg then when i went to 1 meg i was getting roughly 120kbs max, now its about 180kbs max but these are top speeds not average. average speed depends on what software i am using, my file sharing is about 30 kbs and sometimes 70kbs etc but if i was to download say a game demo from a games site then i can get 120kbs up.

Bulldog are doing a good deal and in comparison to blueyonder i could get a 2 meg broadband connection for 5 pounds less than what i am paying now for 1.5 meg but i need to be on bt to get this so actually im not really getting a good deal when you think about it but i can say that the blueyonder broadband is very good service and very rarely completely fails though there are internet access problems every so often. My mates on Bt broadband and he is getting a pretty awful service compared to me, he even gets cut off after about 6 hours and has to reset his machine to get it up and running again.
 

rolfw

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Strange that, I've been on BTOpenworld now for several years and have only had one period of a day where the connection was impossible and an evening when the DNS servers were playing up, otherwise the service has been exceptionally reliable.

Having said all of that, yes the line does drop occasionally after long periods of inactivity, but my router simply reconnects.
 

s*t*a*r*m*a*n

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Hi rolf :)
yes i have been saying to my mate that things are not right with his machine. He got on to BT but they said everything was acceptable but i think they have a problem with people using file sharing software etc and visiting warez sites as my friend says that he gets blocked from accessing certain sites.
 
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