Quote:
Originally Posted by General Maximus
the long and short of it is that you are going to be far better off with VM. Going from 5.6mbits up to 100mbits is a massive jump and to be honest you'll think you have died and gone to heaven. There are 4 things to take into consideration though so you don't get yourself in a fanny flap:
1) The technology VM use is completely different to all the other isps in the UK and in lamens terms you basically share part of your connection with everyone else in your area. Although you will probably gets close to 100mbits most of the time, you won't get full speed all the time, especially in the evenings and during the weekend so don't have aheart attack if your speed tests come back t half speed or something
2) VM operate a traffic management policy in the evening and weekends and if you download a specific amount of data (I think it is something like 5gb in 1 hour for us) then they temporarily reduce your speed in order to reduce congestion on the network
3) VM also do traffic shaping during the evening and weekends on p2p traffic. Basically they flag it as low priority on the network to make sure that everyone torrenting doesnt suck up the juice for everyone else. This means that even if you havent download anything at all, sometimes your torrents will crawl along at speeds which are so pathetic that you had might as well not bother downloading them (which is the whole point I think). That being said, that symtom only affects some people. Even with shaping in effect, I still have no probs downloading at 4-5MB/sec in the evening (40mbits) on torrents
4) Remember that just because you are on 100mbits doesnt mean you are always going to get 100mbits. Network congestion aside, the speed you download from stuff like torrents is entirely dependant on how fast your peers can upload. There are going to be some torrents which are hardly seeded and you might only get 200k on, others 2MB/sec and more popular stuff you might get full speed on if you use a private tracker. The nice thing though is that you have got more than enough juice to go around so you can get your torrents going and do other stuff at the same time.
It would be wise. Although the plugs are 54mbits the devices will only get 25mbits give or take because of how they work so it is going to be a shame if you don't take advantage of your new 100mbits connection and let your wireless devices run at one quarter speed. Give shub2 a go and see how good the wireless is on it and if it doesn't quite make the mark then you can look at upgrading your home plugs. Just remember, the wireless adapters in all of your wireless devices (laptops/phone etc) will also need to be 802.11n if you want them to connect at the faster speeds.
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Thank-you so much for all this advice.
Like you have said I understand the torrents side of things. My main problem with Sky is the dropping off all the the time and the amount of time it sometimes takes to load a web page let alone anything else. I think I am going to give the wireless a try first before investing in the Homeplugs.
Another issue I have a the moment is whilst watching anything from Netflix, even in Super HD, the picture is crap. Is this anything to do with my Internet?