Download rate for premium members...

166Driver · Post by **166Driver** » Sun Jul 18, 2004 9:16 pm

What is the max kb/s available to each premium user downloading? Reason I ask is that I am in the process of getting broadband, and am willing to pay for membership.

Post by **leviathan1949** » Sun Jul 18, 2004 9:19 pm

It'll go as fast your Broadband can cope with. Bear in mind that some ISP's limit the total transfer by the month.
On a 512K Broadband you should expect 60Kb/s, on a 1Mb Broadband you should expect 120Kb/s.
Therfore on 512K you can download about 200 Megs an hour.
Premium Members are not queued and not bandwidth restricted.

Lad491 · Post by **Lad491** » Sun Jul 18, 2004 9:34 pm

I dont download a great deal from here - but when I do I typically get between 65 and 75 Kb/s which is actually slightly higher than the bandwidth I pay NTL for. Sometimes though it depends on the time of day since it is a shared service (10mb shared between 19 users for NTL) so it varies slightly depending on how many other people in my road are also downloading.

166Driver · Post by **166Driver** » Sun Jul 18, 2004 9:42 pm

That's why I didn't go for NTL. When a friend told me that bandwidth was shared with the other people in the same street, I didn't believe him. I'm not sure if BT are doing the same on my package, but there's a 15gb monthly limit.

baldwin · Post by **baldwin** » Sun Jul 18, 2004 10:04 pm

All broadband is on a shared basis, unless you pay a hefty premium. It can get as high as 25 on one pipe, but very rarely does.

Mervyn

thenudehamster · Post by **thenudehamster** » Sun Jul 18, 2004 10:25 pm

I can, and do, get up to 400KB/s on a 3Mb Cable system (which is shared, as Mervyn says) but I do most of my downloading during the day when the system is comparatively quiet. If you can do similar things, you'll get the best speed. You will, it's fairly certain, still get an enormous speed increase with broadband, even dsl, comapred with 56k dialup.

166Driver · Post by **166Driver** » Sun Jul 18, 2004 10:39 pm

I'm not a huge fan of sharing! Would it be shared between 20 ramdom people, or people local to me? I would prefer the latter, because they tend not to download large files on a regular basis, but unfortunately there is a huge office at the end of my back garden with 30+ computers in there, all with a connection I presume?

thenudehamster · Post by **thenudehamster** » Sun Jul 18, 2004 10:47 pm

It depends on what the office at the bottom of the garden has for a connection; for all we know they have their own dedicated T1 or T3 connection, in which case it won't affect you in the slightest.
Unless you want to pay an exorbitant amount for a dedicated line, you are going to share a broadband connection. Depending on the total pipe bandwidth, you may or may not notice significant differences in speed when others are on. As I said, my cable connection is rated at 3Mb/s - but that is shared among a large number of users eventually; how many share it at one specific time is anyone's guess, but even at busy times I never get less than 80KB/s on UKTS downloads.

166Driver · Post by **166Driver** » Sun Jul 18, 2004 10:55 pm

Well, I'm not bothered, unless my speed drops significantly. I'm going for the 512k variety of broadband, would probably do my downloading late at night, or early in the morning. Only problem is upgrading from this 56k, forgotten my security phrase, emailed BT, with no response, emailed them again, and as I went away for the weekend, they left a message on the phone.

Post by **NeutronIC** » Sun Jul 18, 2004 10:58 pm

The phrase you are looking for is 'contention ratio'. All broadband connections are contended. Home connections are on a 50:1 ratio and business connections are on a 20:1 ratio. Some more specialist ISP's will do 10:1, 5:1 2:1 and 1:1 contention ratios - however the costs go up rapidly.

It's like when you have a dial-up connection with an ISP, back in the days of that being the principle connection method people spoke about user to modem ratios - it's exactly the same. With the ISP I used to work at (small one, badly managed) we had about 30:1 contention I think which meant for every modem we had 30 users.

It's not all bad though - there are benefits in large quantities, taking the modem example:

If you have 1 modem then you have 30 people trying to get on to it and the chances of a busy tone are enormous, pretty much guaranteed.

If you have 1,000 modems then you have 30,000 users - the chances of you getting a busy tone are comparatively small and indeed you'd find most people would get on in a couple of tries even at the busiest time.

The same is true with broadband bandwidth - the contention ratio makes very little sense if you don't know what is being contended for. With some networks you might be sharing the bandwidth that gets to the green box on your street - i.e. not a vast amount. In some situations you might be sharing what's at the exchange or head-end - usually a very large amount.

I'm on a 50:1 contended ADSL connection and very rarely see a drop under 55k/s - though my ADSL is 5.5km from the exchange running 61.5db (1.5db over the limit) and has about 10db Signal to Noise Ratio (should be more like 20 or 30) - so it's an absolutely appalling line. It's good enough for BT though so they won't do anything about it - and since I can't get above 512k anyway I'm jumping ship and moving to NTL where I can get 1mb now and shortly they'll be bumping all 1mb connections up to 1.5mb for no extra cost.

I got a 20:1 contended line for my day-job office when we moved and to be honest I can't tell the difference.

Matt.

Crosstie · Post by **Crosstie** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 12:22 am

Like BarryH, I'm on a 3MB cable system. Many of my neighbors share this connection, but I've never seen it go below 300kb/s for a download.

I would always go for cable over DSL if it's available over there,though I've read a lot of negative press about UK Broadband availability.

Lad491 · Post by **Lad491** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 5:59 am

With NTL my understanding is contention is shared between people in your street or very close group of streets, via the green box at the end of the road. The 19:1 limit is set so I never get below what I pay for - 600 K/bs but sometimes I get vastly more than that. My best was a download from IBM at 11pm one night where i got 93.7K/bs.

When performance appears markedly less than i expect it tends to be because of problems with the site I am accessing rather than my broadband link, but even with slow sites I can get 9 or 10 simultanious downloads running to utilise my full bandwidth.

ianm42 · Post by **ianm42** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 10:56 am

I usually get about 90kb/s from uktrainsim on my T-DSL connection in Germany.

buffy500 · Post by **buffy500** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 12:20 pm

I understood that the NTL contention ratio is a lot better than BT's.
As Laurie mentions I *think* its 20:1.

I have run speed tests on mine in the evening and I seem to get about 550K/bs which I think is reasonable for the peak time. As long as its working it seems fairly stable, never really notice it going really slow.

166 Driver wrote:I'm not a huge fan of sharing! Would it be shared between 20 ramdom people, or people local to me?

I bet if you call the ISP and tell them we will hear the people laughing down here !
You would pay for an 'up to XXX K/bs speed' connection, how they organise that is actually nothing much to do with you.

166 Driver wrote:I would prefer the latter, because they tend not to download large files on a regular basis, but unfortunately there is a huge office at the end of my back garden with 30+ computers in there, all with a connection I presume?

This might help, its called NTLHome so I doubt it would be connected to any NTL network you would be connecting too.
But even if the office has 300+ computers, and it is a simple BB connection (which I think is unlikely), then they will have a total limit of what ever they are paying for. So they could also have a 512 connection like you,but they will be fighting only each other for it, the total speed coming out of the office will still only be 512. The total impact they have on other users would be pretty much the same as your could be.
And its also likely that they will use it most in the day when less home users are on.

thenudehamster · Post by **thenudehamster** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 1:41 pm

Just a small additional thought - make sure you know the units your speeds are being quoted in when you compare; my connection is listed at 3Mb/s - that's Megabits per second - while my download speeds are in KB/s, or Kilobytes per second, units eight times as large as may at first seem. This means that my download speed of 400 KB/s is actually exceeding the posted bandwidth of the connection.

I notice many posters are quoting all their speeds in Mb/s and Kb/s which may or may not be providing an honest comparison.