How fast is my BB really?
 

I am supposed to have 600k BB. Just now I tried to use the BBC Broadband console. According to the embedded Real player, the stream is 256.1k - yet it was stalling and rebuffering at least every 30 seconds or so. So, what's going on? I'm clearly not getting the bandwidth I'm paying for right now...

One possibility is that the BBC site can't cope with the demand

Edit: I can watch clips fine though, so I don't think it's the site.

That is the quality of the stream, not the speed at which it is downloading (it is a 256k stream, not a 256k download speed)

That is why ntl say you have to have the 600k or 1 meg bb service to receive the streams as the 150k won't be up to the job.

But I thought broadband was about the width of the road, not the speed you could drive on it? Ultimately all data travels at the speed of light. My understanding was that there is a direct relationship between the quality of a stream and the bandwidth available to deliver it?

Not really the speed of light.

The road analogy is one I like. Bandwidth is the width, the number of vehicles you can get down the road at a time. Latency is the speed limit, how fast you can go at down the road. Dial up is therefore a narrow, winding farm track, you can't drive fast and you can't get more than one car down. A 600k BB connection might be a 2 lane dual carriageway, 70mph limit, you can get a lot more cars on it at once.

Stuttering video - you could be on 150k by mistake (it happens) or have bad packet loss, or congestion on the UBR could be reducing bandwidth. And those are just ones ntl could be involved with, you're then talking BBC problems, net problems en route.

I'm beginning to wonder what the advantages of streaming video would be in a world of wide data links and huge storage. Eventually it'll take such a short time to download video and store it locally that some of the advantages of streaming would be lost, and it might only be of use for live events.

at the bottom of nthellworlds homepage, there is a hyperlink called 'speed test'. try that

that is the method I would prefer BB - especially when considering "huge storage" includes DVD writers. (thinking of getting one:))

If only to remove the "requirement" to have a program like Realplayer installed, when I have a setup which will deal better with a downloaded *.mpg, or *.vob, for example.

Of course we have to work out how it all gets paid for.:shrug: