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On Sun, 1 Jan 2012, Neil Winchurst wrote:
As a follow up to all this, I have just run some speed checkers chosen at random via Google. Here are the results5.5, 7.7, 7.8, 8.4, 9.1, 11.0, 11.1 (all at Mbps).These were all run within a few minutes. How on earth can anyone rely on such variable results?
It depends on what you need to rely on it to do. Streaming HD via the BBC iPlyer needs about 2Mb/sec, so you're well inside the limit to do that - even run 2 different streams. The gamers tell me that they want low latency (and presumably low jitter) more than overall bandwidth. Typing on a remote server, as I'm doing now via ssh, I want low latency but don't need any bandwidth at all. (28K modem is fine) Downloading my brothers latest racing photos off his 10MP camera un-scaled will take time, but I never need them immediately, so waiting isn't an issue.
Todays websites are approaching 1MB per page or so I read - the down-side is not so much the quantity of data but the number of objects - your browser might well have to make 20 connections to fetch all the objects and latency may start to show then. Your average user really won't notice at all - a bit of email, web browsing. So what if a web page appears to take a second or 2 longer? It's hardly noticeable.
A friend of mine put this together recently: http://www.10kb-challenge.co.uk/
Any takers? :)I still maintain that I'd rather have a lower speed with a lower contention with well defined caps and more reliability than overall fast speed and "wooly" acceptable use policys. This push to get fibre to the home, etc. is just silly IMO. I'm willing to pay a bit more for a higher quality of service though, but I know cost is a factor for some and the gullible who believe all the TV advertising done by the big players who can afford that sort of advertising deserve what they get...
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq