Quote:
|
Originally Posted by markmarkymark
do I really need to pay £37. To be honest the novelty is wearing a bit thin now ....
|
That's what I've found.
Apart from the occasional download where by some miracle I get full speed, having looked at my statistics I'm not using anywhere near the 1Mbps capacity for 99% of the time (because I don't download 24/7, most of the time I'm just browsing). The difference between 600 and 1Mbps for browsing is not noticeable. Even playing games, it's nowhere near to the capacity.
Upstream is another matter. Although I don't saturate 256kbps by any means and most of the time it's next to nothing, but because I run a web server, when items are pulled off the server there's a short blip to the 256kbps max and those items download much quicker with 256kbps compared to 128kbps, the latter of which seems to make the web server painfully slow downloading images for some reason.
P.S. If you want a reliable download test, try the RedHat Fedora Core ISOs, either through their FTP/HTTP download mirrors or through their Bittorrent links. I pretty much get them downloading at full speed every time (although Bittorrent starts slow and then quickly builds up to full speed, but can be more reliable than the FTP servers due to the very high availability of sources, plus you're stressing downloads with a high upload bandwidth too).
I suggest using something like
PRTG if your Cable Modem supports SNMP, and then you can monitor usage over time and really see just how much you're using and what rate your downloads, browsing and P2P habits come in at. Also handy for spotting downtime 'blibs', such as this strange occurance around midnight
...
This was a bittorrent download I think and it ran flat out most of the time, but a little before midnight it started slowing down and then died completely (upstream too), then recovered (though not back to previous levels). Note that 'out' is from the modem to PC (downstream) and 'in' is from PC to modem (upstream). The real download levels never peaked much above 900kbps.
This was one of the rare occasions where I'd done a download maxing out the connection, but I don't think it will make a big difference if I dropped to 750k when it's out (even between 750 and 1.5). As these downloads are still lengthy and generally done overnight, it makes no odds to me whether it takes 1 hour or 2, especially if I can save £12 a month in the process.