BT with no fuss at all, have just upgraded their local exchange so that my upload speeds (and presumably ditto downloads) have double to 89'ish KB/sec.
Ron
Hi Ron. Not being a pedant here, but just trying to understand what speeds you've got. 89 KB/sec is extremely slow for broadband = c.0.7 Mbps ?? :confused: What used you to get? (Or maybe you're being sarcastic?)
Just checked, download 8264 kbps, upload 741 kbps.
Are these slow?
Ron
Or a 153mb file will take 30 minute to upload to Facebook
Ron
Aha! That's a better speed: c. 8.2 Mbps down (Much more than I get! :( )
I just changed to BT infinity and now get 37Mb/s download and 7Mb/s upload most of the time.
During busy periods it drops to a low of 22 Mb/s.
one very happy bunny...for now.:) :) :)
My speed results this morning
No BT Infinity here. Virgin are in Southport but not this bit and will not get involved in the low tech solution of trenching the areas where they are missing.
Why is download so much faster than upload, and is the "ratio" between my two speeds par for the course?
Ron
Why is download so much faster than upload, and is the "ratio" between my two speeds par for the course?
You are presumably using ADSL (i.e. over your phone line)? That "A" means "asymmetric", so upload is expected to be much slower than download. And your up/download speeds both sound pretty typical for a "mid-range" speed of line.
Ah Thats easy Ron.
When you use the internet most of the time you arent uploading or downloading you are just typing in something or reading something or listening to something.
When you access a page the information on that page has to be Downloaded to your pc. if its text and pictures you want it to be as quick as possible. there nothing worse than watching a page slowly appear on your screen. same with things like emails you want them delivered to your pc as quickly as possibe
However when you reply to an email or a forum post you are uploading. once you have hit the send button you dont really care how long it takes. even if its a big file you can often move and do something else while its uploading.
The ratio between downloading and uploading is typically 4 or 5 to 1.
The fact that there are different speeds gives rise to the term ADSL i.e. Asymetrical Digital Subscribers Line. if they were the same speed ( anyone remember ISDN) It would be symetrical.
The need for ever higher speeds is because files that are Downloaded and uploaded are getting bigger and bigger.
You may remember the early wordprocessor TXT files. typically they were a few Kb in size and we managed with speeds of 14.4 Khz.
then we wanted WYSWIG (what you see is what you get) and microsoft word documents became larger. we strugled with 28.8 Kb modems and then 56.6kb although few of us got that speed.
However once we started wanting to share pictures and music file sizes became a whole lot bigger. Typically pictures (640x480) produced 0.5MB file sizes and MP3 files could be 3MB.
so the need for Broadband. First only .5MB but very quickly going up to 2MB, 4MB and for some lucky customers 8MB.
Now we want to download Movies and share Video on sites like You tube and Vimeo.
File sizes can now be 100's ofMB and even GB in size. Fast Broadband will be the norm before long. BT Infinity gives 40MB max and realistically most customers will get 35MB or more most of the time. Because it uses fibre optics instead of copper for the main part. your not constricted by how far you live from an exchange but how far you are from your Cabinet.
All this has happenned in a relatively short time, 15 -20 years or so. yet we have gone from 14.4kb to 40 Mbs a 3200 times increase. If we can do the same again in the next 20 years who knows what we will be doing on the net then!
I used to work for Marconi, not on the technical side, and before that for one of the BICC companies.
In my BICC days they bemoaned the fact that the first cable tv installation in Britain, that in Croydon, did not use fibre optic cable, which BICC made (patented by STC, also a Brit company). BICC tried to "push" for the higher tech cable but to no avail. This was more than 30 years ago and BICC no longer exists.
Similarly BT failed to adopt fibre technology just before they were privatised. Their technical people were keen, but the politicians said no, go for the cheap solution. BICC and presumably everybody else could put an optical fibre telecoms cable inside a high voltage copper power cable, so where electricity could go, so could fibre optics.
While at Marconi I heard frequent references to ISDL and ASDL and other technical "acronyms' most of which were outside my realm of insurance/finance. I do remember being told that everything in telecoms is more or less yesterdays technology, and that most of what Marconi (and the competition) was selling was, by necessity, state of the art, with all the pitfalls inherent in selling something yet proven.
Marconi has been subsumed into Ericcson (trebles all round for the millionaires on the Marconi board if not the rest of the employees) so I guess that the UK is now reliant on yet another foreign source for technologies which it once pioneered.
Here's me, grateful, pathetically, for the crumbs which fall off the BT table,
Ron
Ron
This might help - see the avoiding confusion section.
Bookmarked!
Thank You David for explaining how the system works. I wish we had a few more posts of "HOW". There are lots of people who have computers but don't understand the workings.
For me it is a case of: This is how you use it and leave the rest to the experts, until it goes wrong.
Mind you after saying that. All information is available on the internet.
It was just nice to see and read this information on the forum. I appreciate when people take the time to write about the workings of an item.
Thank You.
It's quite amazing how we manage to stuff 20 megs of broadband down a copper pair! When I started as a telephone engineer in the 70s, 300hz to 3.4khz of audio was all that you could get down your bog standard telephone line. Then came the modem, starting at 300bps, and in the early days of tinternet, the 56kb/s modem.
But broadband - wow, I remember going broadband and getting 500kb/s internet on ADSL. Then came ADSL Max, which is rate adaptive - the speed depends on the length and quality of the line, and after that ADSL2, up to 20Mb/s.
Infinity moves the exchange kit to the green cabinet in your road, so the copper bit is only the last few hundred yards, much the same as Virgin, although Virgin uses coax I believe rather than twisted copper pairs.
Less than 40 years, my career, and what progress! What's next????
Sounds like your career ran parallel to mine.
I joined BT, then the GPO in back in 1968 straight from achool and stayed nearly 39 years.
back thenthe strowger equipment that was being used had been in place for decades. Now a technology comes into use and within 5 years its obsolete....and the pace of change seems to get faster and faster. You wonder if it will ever slow down.
I started as an apprentice in 1973, and in my 3rd year was aimed for Strowger maintenance in my local exchange, which was the GSC. My year was the biggest apprentice intake ever for the old Leicester Telephone Area, as a new International Switching Centre was planned for Leicester. By the time I ended my 3rd year, the ISC had been scrapped, and most apprentices were shifted onto other work. I ended up on Subs & Lines, a job I really enjoyed in the summer, but was horribly cold and wet in the winter.
After 4 years, I ended up on PABX Maintenance, which I still do, which was still Strowger then, but the micro chip soon took over. Now, I work on the old Nortel products, now made by Avaya, which is mainly Unix/Linux and Windows servers.
Yes, the pace of change is relentless, with new versions of everything released every year. In the old GPO days, it took years to get a product released!