Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Over the last few years I have seen our cable speed go up from 4 mbps to 20...and yet with few exceptions, it still seems like it's at 4. Some downloads take forever. Some downloads that I have done from the same servers are no faster now than they were then. What gives?

Is this just server traffic? If so where is the benefit of having more speed? It's like driving a Lamborghini on southern California..whats the point?

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Need DSL get off the cable you are acually sharing that connection speed with others in the hood.... get DSL and get the signal to your house only....

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

That is not as big an issue as it was 5 years ago. Cable companies have upgraded their hardware enough to give a pretty good signal.

Downloading depends on who you are getting it from and how you are doing it. For instance, if you are downloading via peer to peer, you can have all the bandwidth in the world, but if you are getting it from just one seed and he has ratio set too low, it will take forever to download.

My cable has went up to 12-14mbps lately, and I can download a 700mb+ distro in under 15 minutes easily. It is a delicate balance between your bandwidth and the seeder.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Yet I my broadband test speed is always 20megs

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

how do I test my DSL for speed??

I just got a new Netgear Rangemax WNDR3700 Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router.

Made a huge dif on my speed.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Get a stopwatch and a really good microscope, and count the bits as they go through the wire for one second. Oh. Wait. You said wireless. OK, get a really good video camera...

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

LOL! I did say wireless. But I pretty much just use the four ports in the back for wired connections.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Ah. Microscope, then.

But seriously, there are web sites that will measure your effective internet speed. E.g., www.speedtest.net.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

25 ms and 1 ms jitter and zero loss.

Oh, and my firewall did not like that test!

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Hmm. Not sure what that means. Lemme start a poll to find out! :ursofunny

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

choose the closest server
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

1.29Mbps download

.33 upload

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

You have DSL?

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

yes

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

well 20 is only about 4 times faster than 4.... Which is probably going to go unnoticed for the most part. I mean if a web page loads in .025 seconds instead of .1 seconds, are you really going to notice? Now on large downloads, you should notice about a 4x difference. This would be very noticeable. 1 minute instead of 4 mins. 30 mins instead of 2 hours. So if you aren't noticing near a 4x improvement on large downloads then its very possible that the servers you are downloading from don't upload at the full capacity of your download speed.

If you think about it for large sites that have many visitors then this actually makes quite a bit of sense. To be able to Max out 10 connections like yours, that server would have to have an upload speed 10 times your download speed. To max out 100 connections like yours it would have to have an upload speed of 100 times your download speed. Now I don't know about you but these are quickly climbing up to some massive speeds.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

so is this fast or slow?

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

when it comes to downloads I go by rate, not time

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

pretty slow, not the slowest dsl though. You must have a low tier 1.5Mbs. That is what I had when I had DSL. It also depends on the equipment. For here Verizon charges the same price, if you change locations the same service will top out at 3

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Download speed: 2.97 Mbps
Upload speed: 0.51 Mbps

Is that fast or slow? and how do I find out what it is SUPPOSED to be? I mean, don't I pay Embarq for a certain speed? if so, I'd like to know that I am really getting that speed.. Does that make sense?

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

If this it slow, why is it blowing me away? The pages come up as fast as I can look and click.

Oh great! Now someone is gonna tell me it's my BRAIN that's slow!

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

It's your BRAIN that's slow.

:D

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

It seems fast because you are mainly surfing with it. Most pages don't require that much bandwidth to load. You would notice more of a difference if you were playing online games or downloading larger files.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

When I was on the City Council here, we pushed through a fiber to the home project. So every home in town has fiber directly to the house.
My speed is 10.14 down
4.98 up

However I saw the biggest increase in speed when I bought a new iMac last month.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

:thumbsup Mac all the way! I believe it's the will of God! lol :ursofunny

BT

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

My download speed: 17.5 Mb/s
Upload: 3.33 Mb/s

Yes, the speed is good. BUT.... it it ONLY as good as the local server I am trying to access! I still download files where I am only getting them at one hundredth of what I am capable of because their servers are maxed out.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

18 Hail Mary's in a dark closest outta forgive you for that.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

I've been out of the closet for a long time. I had my first Mac in 1988 - SE/20. I have 4 macs at home, including an old Mac Plus, and about 35 at work that I manage.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

I manage about 80 Macbooks at work, several Mac Pro's and a Mac server so I am very familiar with them, and despite my constant ribbing, there ARE many things I like about them, but there are also things I really cannot stand as well.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Who's your ISP?

I have Comcast and there was a point in time a couple of years ago that I was getting unreal download speeds in the 40's and 50's. Right now I'm back to 3.5 meg.

... Wait a minute... I think we were supposed to be getting the upgrade added on ... gonna call them today.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Heh! You're a Mac sys admin? What a wienie. Ha! http://www.apostolicfriendsforum.com...ons/icon10.gif

Do you wear "product" in your hair? Did your eyeglass frames cost more than your laptop?

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

We have ONE Mac server. Only ONE! LOL It is used for publishing podcasts and as an update server for all the other Macs. We have a half a dozen Windows servers that do the REAL work here.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

We have 3 XServes and (Thank God) no Windows servers.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Who is your ISP?

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Once NT died out Windows servers have become increasingly reliable. No more reboot every day, or several times a day. In fact, most people don't even seem to remember those days.

I've never worked with xservers - that's the Mac OS Xserver, right? To be honest I've been thinking about a change of religion lately. There's a lot of stuff that I neeed to do on the fly that I know a Mac can handle without a bunch of fooling around.

Anybody remember Aldus? Those were the days. I was productive then.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Our Windows servers run continually without any issues. The only times they are rebooted is when MS pushes down updates, usually at 2 in the morning when no one cares anyways.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

It's a small local company called TCT West. They serve most of NW Wyoming and have been very proactive with fiber.
I have their bottom end service, but it's plenty for home use.

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TimeWarner here. They have to keep up with Verizon fios

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Yes, they are the Mac servers. One of the really nice things about, other than I may not even go in the server room for a couple weeks at a time, is how easy it is to keep a running backup.

And yes I remember Aldus Pagemaker.

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

Depends..are you sharing your internet with cable tv services in your home?..how many other computers are acessing the same service,how fast is your computer..yeah it may be new and fast at first but if you notice they do the service pak updates little by little and it makes it slower...these are some things to consider..

Re: Is Broadband Speed Just an Illusion?
 

No TV. Just mine. It's fast. I know how to monitor network traffic, So Im talking about times when Windows is not doing an update (or anything else)