Clever s*ds - help required please!!

[MBH]

Well done giraffe - I'm sure she'll be thrilled. A present that money literally can't buy

[Biscuit]

Hi

can anyone explain this to me.

BT have upped our connection to 4mb a couple of months ago but it is still really slow. My son showed me speedtest.net that showed that it is consistently at 2.57 - does anyone understand why this is - are bt conning me by getting me to subscribe to a 4mb service but only delivering 2.57.

Biscuit

[Scurra]

The day a broadband service actually delivers the speed they promise... will be the day the internet collapses

Unfortunately, there are all sorts of reasons why the "advertised" speed is rarely achieved, from service contention (if everyone on your street is using the service at the same time) through to distance from the exchange (the further you are, the less speed you can reliably get.) None of these are technically BT's fault though, so they can always maintain that the speed is relative.

Personally, I think you're doing pretty well getting 2.5 from a 4mb connection. I've got a 20mb one here and I normally get about 10. But that's more than enough for what I use it for.

[Biscuit]

could it be the reason that it keeps freezing on me. I've been blaiming my son because he hasn't got a wireless card and says he must be attached via a cable (I said i would get him a wireless card but he insists he wants to be connected via cable)- i was thinking maybe he somehow got internet priority for his gaming and we were left with what was left after his gaming needs had been satisfied. That's a lot of mb you have = perhaps I should talk to bt about increasing ours.

Biscuit

[eirian]

As far as I understand it, the speed you can get is limited by the cables that are in your area. For example, we have a maximum speed of 8mb (although rarely get near that, more like 5mb I would say on a good day (ie, not evenings or weekends when everyone else is on as well)), and that's all anyone could give us as that's all the BT exchange can handle. I suspect Scurra has the advantage of living in London....

My wireless often drops out (usually lasts max of 10 mins before it goes and I need to tell it to try again). It's not related to Sigur's wired connection upstairs though, as it happens whether or not he's online!

Curiously, occasionally both our connections would go, in that we wouldn't be able to open new windows/refresh pages etc, but if we were playing an online game, that would continue to work fine!

[clvrlad]

also youll see bt advertise it as a peak level (as in upto 4mb) the average is usually significantly slower it just sounds better.
that and almost all others internet providers do the same thing so unfortunately if they stated the average in big letters everyone would go to the others specifying the peak value

and they usually group people together and they share the connections from the local exchange oh and if its not a game where your playing against anyone the game downloads and then its temporarily on your hard drive no internet needed ive regularly disconnected and kept playing just to save my download allowence

[eirian]

well, that's what's surprising, in that it usually is a game against other people (usually a MMORG), so no idea why that should continue to work when everything else doesn't!

[clvrlad]

so what mmorg you on
for thoes too lazy to find out
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game

[MBH]

(I said i would get him a wireless card but he insists he wants to be connected via cable)

Smart boy (Ref: my wireless problems of last night that seem to be gone today)

[SparkOut]

well, that's what's surprising, in that it usually is a game against other people (usually a MMORG), so no idea why that should continue to work when everything else doesn't!

Probably possibly (there's too many things that could cause intermittent issues) but in this case, I would guess that the fault is likely with the service provider's proxy (which receives the request for the page address given, and checks whether it's already got an up to date copy of it, and if it has, then it just gives you the one it "collected" from the site before, instead of transferring the exact same stuff from the server again. There may be millions of pages served up for the BBC website daily, for instance, and rather than transfer every one of those millions of pages through the whole network, the proxy server local to you will fetch it once* and distribute it to all the local users who ask for it. *once is a euphemism - a rapidly updating site like BBC will still be fetched many times over by the proxy server - every time it gets asked for http://www.bbc.co.uk it will make a quick check to see if the page it has is the same as the one the BBC server would give - if the BBC content E-tag is different, it will fetch the new page to give out.) Game traffic would use different "port numbers" and the routing equipment in the exchange would not direct it through the proxy servers and instead sling it on its way through the internet.
(There are other things that I could mention about game traffic and P2P prioritisation/demotion equipment that ISPs have to control the rate of data flow for different types of internet traffic, but that's enough info for now I think!)

[Scurra]

(There are other things that I could mention about game traffic and P2P prioritisation/demotion equipment that ISPs have to control the rate of data flow for different types of internet traffic, but that's enough info for now I think!)

You know, that's why some of us didn't even bother to start trying to explain it My first thought was that it may have something to do with the different sort of data that an MMORG transmits compared to, say, a web page to. It's easy to forget that the "internet" isn't the "world wide web".

[SparkOut]

could it be the reason that it keeps freezing on me. I've been blaiming my son because he hasn't got a wireless card and says he must be attached via a cable (I said i would get him a wireless card but he insists he wants to be connected via cable)- i was thinking maybe he somehow got internet priority for his gaming and we were left with what was left after his gaming needs had been satisfied. That's a lot of mb you have = perhaps I should talk to bt about increasing ours.

Biscuit

If your son is gaming, then he is likely using a significant share of the bandwidth you have available. Just as described with the local area users all getting online in the evening and slowing things down for each other, then where you have a finite connection speed between your house and the exchange, that finite speed will have to be shared between all the users in your house (and possibly the neighbours/netstumblers in the street if you have an unsecured wifi network ).
Being connected by cable does not give him any "priority" - there is a factor in gaming called "latency" which is the length of time it takes a packet of data to travel between the source and the destination. Because the router in your house has to catch the data packet, encrypt it, wrap it in security wrappers and broadcast it on the radio to a wifi enabled computer, which then has to unwrap the security, unencrypt it and do its thing, this can increase the latency over a cable connection. It's not really noticeable in "normal" use, but gaming online can depend on those split second fragments. He's got a point, but possibly a marginal one. If you got him a wifi card and he carried on gaming he might find it acceptable, maybe not, but there wouldn't be any improvement in the slowdown of your internet service while he's gaming. It's just that you're sharing the bandwidth that's there, data flows down the line at the same top speed, but only half of it's yours. (Like running two baths from one tap.)

I nominally have between 3MB - 4MB service (as a maximum due to line quality/exchange distance), and it varies between 1MB and 2MB actual download speed.

[SparkOut]

[Scurra]

Hey, isn't that giving away trade secrets?

[Laura]

I have tried so many times to explain to my mum the process of clicking on the button that looks like the best possibility and seeing if it works, but she still thinks that I actuallly know what to do!

[Laura]

I have tried so many times to explain to my mum the process of clicking on the button that looks like the best possibility and seeing if it works, but she still thinks that I actuallly know what to do!

[Scurra]

Deja vu.

[giraffe]

I get the impression Laura has to tell her Mum everything twice!

[Laura]

sorry, I thought it might do that.

Computer seems to be on a bit of a go-slow today, and hadn't appeared to even register that I'd clicked submit the first time, then wouldn't let me view the message til I'd gone off the site and come back again.

[clvrlad]

well in that case see if the settings are wrong ie press some random buttons