Ask Blackburn University to set up a microwave link to your area of town.
Our village has a population of around 300, ~100houses spread over a large hill farming area.
There is no prospect of ever getting cable. nor fibre here, just not enough demand to justify the expense of serving a rural community.
Even the cut price ISPs charge extra to rent BT wire and pass that on to customers. BT won't unbundle, even though the Scottish Government paid for the broadband installation into their rural exchanges. The ISPs won't install their own equipment to bypass renting BT wire. The customer base is too low to justify the capital cost.
Edinburgh University came to our aid. Well done on them and thank you.
Our village has a population of around 300, ~100houses spread over a large hill farming area.
There is no prospect of ever getting cable. nor fibre here, just not enough demand to justify the expense of serving a rural community.
Even the cut price ISPs charge extra to rent BT wire and pass that on to customers. BT won't unbundle, even though the Scottish Government paid for the broadband installation into their rural exchanges. The ISPs won't install their own equipment to bypass renting BT wire. The customer base is too low to justify the capital cost.
Edinburgh University came to our aid. Well done on them and thank you.
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Our problem in Blackburn (via a BT engineer) is that there are lots of Virgin Customers so their return wont be a great, so we are last in our area, even fleapit villages have it round us.
End of this month.
My main problem is up-load, It takes ages just to upload 1 image to Flickr and often times out when using Lightroom.
End of this month.
My main problem is up-load, It takes ages just to upload 1 image to Flickr and often times out when using Lightroom.
Andrew, this has been my argument from the start. The speed you can connect with to your ISP, or the server running the test seems to have little relationship to "real world" sites we all use. Like you, I downloaded some big files over the weekend (Windows 8.1 Enterprise to give it a trial run) and so these were very large files, around 2.5Gb from memory.And they took around 30 minutes instead of the 70 seconds my "raw" speed would suggest. Even uploading files to ISP's own email service takes a while. For example a 10mb upload should take around a second. Instead it takes perhaps 20 or 30 to attach the file.
The LOAD placed on the system by others downloading films at odd times of the day must use up a very large portion of the available bandwidth. Gamers use quite a bit of bandwidth, but they are, maybe, a quite small portion of the population.
As more do it, we will all suffer tighter bottlenecks in the data distribution systems.
That is part of my reasoning on harping on about our excessive file sizes for pics.
As more do it, we will all suffer tighter bottlenecks in the data distribution systems.
That is part of my reasoning on harping on about our excessive file sizes for pics.
I'm sitting in an airport in Taiwan on their free wifi though I would do a speed test
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Well of course, it doesn't matter if you've got a 100Mbit line if the person sending stuff to you can only manage 1Mbit on their upload. Most hosts of large files though can upload at very high speeds. Online computer game retailers are one, Steam, Origin/EA, Gamersgate etc, whenever I download from them I tend to get close to the line speed, this was on the 60Mbit line, whether or not it holds up on the 100Mbit line I'm yet to find out. But the difference between downloading a 10GB game on a 60 or 100Mbit line isn't that much of an issue, both are fast enough that you're not peeved at how 'slow' it's going.
Beyond that though it has been my experience that most other file hosts can manage at least 10Mb and for most smaller files that's usually plenty. This isn't counting the plethora of file hosts that give you a bonus for registering or paying, they tend to cut back the speed on purpose.
Edit - I thought I would just add here that one of the biggest differences I get for browsing speed and responsiveness is actually using the 5GHz band on the wireless router. Yes, the 2.4GHz band is particularly poor with the Virgin provided Superhub and Superhub 2, but the 5GHz band on the Superhub 2 is pretty good. I do get 100Mbit through the wireless, both on my desktop and the two 5GHz compatible tablets we've got. The 2.4GHz band struggles to get beyond 20Mbit and even though the speed is still technically pretty fast, changing over the hardware to use the other band improves how fast web pages respond. This is obviously not a raw throughput issue, but something else.
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If I'm honest I can't really say that any of the speed increases that I have seen have translated into faster web browsing. Some sites are quick (I put diyAudio in that category 99% of the time) and some very slow, usually the ones with loads of ads that have to load before you can even scroll the page.
When I first got "broadand" my actual speed was 0.04Mbs (I think the old twisted pair really was just twisted together at every junction
) and yet normal web pages still loaded pretty quickly from memory.
What's the point? The speed of your broadband provider is likely astonishgly high but it doesn't mean anything when the weakest link in the chain is everything else you connect to. One slow server or a connection error and that's it.
I stopped worrying about Internet speed the day we gave up on using dial up modems. I can dowload gigabytes of stuff from certain servers in no time while some websites take ages to download simple text-based pages.
I stopped worrying about Internet speed the day we gave up on using dial up modems. I can dowload gigabytes of stuff from certain servers in no time while some websites take ages to download simple text-based pages.
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