Author Topic: Why can't I get faster downloads? (Read 1371 times)

Lovepeaceguru · « **on:** November 09, 2006, 04:10:51 pm »

I have recently upgraded from a wireless 1Mb ISP (Now) to 10Mb cable (Telewest). On Now I would frequently get total d/l running at 50/60/70 k but on Telewest I don't seem to be getting any more. My connection is now set to T3 or faster. Any ideas?

Bearded Blunder · « **Reply #1 on:** November 09, 2006, 04:32:36 pm »

buy the guy you're downloading from a faster connection, he can only give out data so fast... just because you upgraded doesn't mean the rest of us can all go faster

KM · « **Reply #2 on:** November 09, 2006, 04:58:57 pm »

it's the slowest point that determines the speed, your previous connection as 1Mbit was 120k/s, so that was not the slowest point - so changing that would have made no difference

most users (like, you for example) have much slower upload speeds than download, so they can't send anywhere near as fast as they can download - on telewest you have 0.38Mbit to upload at, so someone else with a 0.5Mbit connection couldn't download from you at full speed

that is often the limiting speed in most cases, most of the time the other user has 256k upload so you'll get 30k/sish from them, which is why the most common speed to get is that, no matter what your maximum download speed is - it will only help to upgrade it if you are actually using it in the first place, which would normally mean downloading a lot of files all the time

btw Telewest are a good choice, only ISP I would use except perhaps BT (but BT charge more) because i really want reliability and none of the others come close to it, been with them years (must be at least 4 or 5) and only had it go down a few of times and those have almost all been short 10 minute outages at like 5am (and I've been using it as it went down every single time - lol), once a few years ago it was slow for a day due to them breaking something before they got redundancy in place, a few months ago it was off for a few hours because someone tripped over something (that's what it normally means when they say equipment failure, they are referring to the engineer), and the other week something broke and took them off all night but that was at the same time that a power surge fried my network so i didn't notice it (i bet they were related... their surge protectors just as broken as mine?)

SamSeeSam · « **Reply #3 on:** November 09, 2006, 05:01:42 pm »

When you have more than one, say about 5-6 downloads runnign simultaneouslt, see your downlaod speed. That will be a better indication than simply one download

Cheers

Lovepeaceguru · « **Reply #4 on:** November 11, 2006, 11:16:02 am »

Thx all for your input. I understand the limitation of upload speeds. Samseesam hits the nail on the head. I used to get, say, 60k in total download speed (maybe 10 - 20 downloads)on my 1Mb connection. I have seen 120k total once but generally only around 60k total on my 10Mb connection.

Also, at the best I seem to be getting about 7.2Mb. Why? I understood that on cable there was no contention ratio and no "distance from exchange" problem?

Interesting and valuable feedback on Telewest. Thank you!

KM · « **Reply #5 on:** November 11, 2006, 12:18:39 pm »

on cable there is more contention, as it is a shared connection - however it's also a faster shared connection (some cable links they are working on upgrading to 1Gbit connections, which would then be shared with all users on it - not sure what they are in most places atm though) however telewest are not bad for oversubscribing and always seem to have sufficient bandwidth available (unlike NTL i'd like to add... who are really bad, and unfortunately they recently merged so things could well change in 6 months)

some of the modems that telewest used to give out are unable to manage 10Mbit (at the time the fastest they even dreamed of offering was 2Mbit, so it's understandable that they wouldn't have worried about a modem only handling 8Mbit or so) also if your modem is connected to your computer via USB then you will be unlikely to use the full 10Mbit - if you are using USB then instead connecting it to a network card (all of the modems i've seen them give out have both options) would be likely to get the full 10Mbit, failing that if you do happen to have one of the modems that doesn't support 10Mbit (you'd have to google it, not sure which they are with problems) then phoning them up will often result in them sending out someone to replace it

of course to test if you are able to get the 10Mbit the best way is multiple downloads from different high speed download servers, personally i use several mirrors for a major linux distro as high speed sources - it is unlikely that a single connection to even a very fast server will use 10Mbit due to TCP limitations (which even if you changed your end are unlikely to be changed at the other end)