Slow DSL down/up

[jeff.macaddict]

I have either 512 or 640 kbps DSL from MSN going through quest. It is slow.

I download from browsers at less than 20kbps usually and the fastest I've ever been able to download is 75 kbps. I've even experimented with the terminal to speed it up.

This pisses me off. I used internet explorer in virtual pc with win xp, and I actually acheived download rates from the browser of up to 435 kbps! What gives?!

Any help is appreciated.

 

[snickelfritz]

Go to dslreports.com and test your connection there.
It will return a result graphed with your performance relative to other connections.

 

[neoelectronaut]

Just for posterity...

Your download speed : 232620 bps, or 232 kbps.
A 28.3 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 98643 bps, or 98 kbps.

 

[jeff.macaddict]

confirmed.....

Yes, i have confirmed that I have fast service, just I can't use it. I used 2wire's (2wire) internet speed service, and kept getting 570 kbps, give or take 5 kbps.

It's not my computer, I borrowed a new iBook from school and hooked it up to my ethernet router, and the same kind of speeds were to be had on that machine as well.

By the way, it isn't my ethernet router, it's a new Asante 10/100 mbps router, and even if I just hook my computer directly to the DSL modem, I get the same speeds.

 

[TMA]

Re: confirmed.....

Are you sure you're not confusing Kbps and KB/s here? If you have a 512kbps down speed DSL connection the maximum transer rate you'll get is about 60KB/s (very roughly)

Also depends if other people in your area are using the DSL service alot. If they are then it'll reach a point where your speeds will drop. Can depend on things like time of day.

 

[jeff.macaddict]

oh

Oh, i get it now.

But that doesn't explain the 120-435k/s download I got using VPC, and the 30-70 k/s downloads I get using Mac OS X.

 

[Thirteenva]

Re: Re: confirmed.....

Originally posted by TMA

Also depends if other people in your area are using the DSL service alot. If they are then it'll reach a point where your speeds will drop. Can depend on things like time of day.

You sure about that....

One of the selling points of dsl vs. cable has been that dsl does not suffer from the effects that cable will if someone in your area is hogging bandwidth.

I live in an apartment where quite a few people have dsl, I am also just within the maximum range for my C.O. yet i get 98% of my 768kbs advertised speed and regularly see 90kb/s download speed.

Part of the reason i like my dsl service better than the cable I had in NY was that even though my cable in NY was 3mbs it had lots of drop off issues due to people running p2p and servers in the area. Bandwidth usage was out of control.


Also... To the original poster. Go to version tracker or google and look for "broadbandOptimizer" It optimizes the computers ethernet settings to squeeze out some more performance from dsl. I saw a 6kb/s speed increase since using it.

 

[TMA]

Thirteenva -
I should have added that it depends on which country/ISP/service you live in. Here in England most DSL services are shared with a 50:1 contention ratio, though this is usually good enough (I got optimum speeds 99.9% of the time when I had it) in some areas it can sometimes cause problems, especially as the uptake of broadband in households increases.

jeff.macaddict -
I have noticed quirks in the way Windows reports download speeds when using VPC. I think it's to do with the way it emulates. I picture it working something like this: You load a web page in VPC, your mac recieves, say 100kb, of data in 10 seconds. So that's actually 10kb/second. That data has got to get through your macs network software, into VPC and finally into windows. By the time windows tries to work out the transfer speed, most of the file has already been downloaded onto the computer. VPC or Windows interprits this as meaning the file has already been downloaded alot faster than it actually has. It might 'think' it only took 5 seconds, in which case 20kb/second rather than 10kb/sec. I think that makes sense, sorry I'm not really great at explaining theories like that.

In short, The maths used in Windows to calculate the transfer rate gets confused because of it being run inside VPC on top of the Mac OS. Could be wrong but thats my thoughts on it. If you really want a reliable way to monitor your bandwidth, the best program i've found is 'Netmonitor' (http://homepage.mac.com/rominar/net.html)