Is your connection being limited?

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Was browsing over at lifehacker.com and saw This Article on tools for measuring if your ISP is throttling your bandwidth and, for you torrent users, if torrents and ports are being blocked.

Haven't tried it yet as I am still in the office but it looks interesting.

 

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Not that I use torrents a lot... *ahem*

...but thankfully my ISP doesn't throttle any downloads.

Still, this could be useful for those that don't know.

Nice link.

Qs

 

I'm currently having ongoing discussions with Tiscali.

I was hitting 3200 kbs download, not great, but pretty OK for my area, at last look it was less than 300 kbs.

Will take a look at the article when I'm at home.

 

Nope there is a fair use policy in place but my ISP likes bragging that its never came across a case where it was enforced

 

My ISP must do because some days I am getting faster than what I am paying for and same days I get really crappy speeds.

IT took me four hours to download 200MB the other day whilst last week I down loaded 1.2GB in an hour.

I only have 2 megabit connection

 

Remember that the speed or a torrent is proportional to its' seeders/leechers upload speed.

Less people sharing = Lower download speeds for you.


...unless you just went off at a tangent and started talking about something else

Qs

 

this wasn't a torrent, I don't use it. This was a download (200MB one) from Microsoft the other was a demo from fileshack.

 

Nope! Full speed ahead here. For the amount they charge for DSL here I should be on a 6 squillion gbit line not a 2mb line!

 

While true at the moment Virgin are ending that policy soon

 

No throttling on my line, im with be broadband and they have never throttled my speeds and the price is good aswell.

 

Im guessing you have a cable connection?

 

I freakin wish, it normaly sits at 3200 ish, but then went down to 600 kbs last week which I reported.

Tiscali didn't really believe my results so I posted direct links as I have hear and tried it on a Dell One Netbook as well.

I'm back in the 1980's using Broadband which actually prefers to be Dial up

 

just normal ADSL but I don't think the wiring has been done fore 25 years and the house is 250 years old too and I'm 1.5 miles away from the telephone exchange.

 

Meh. I'm a bit in two minds about all this. My UBR is regularly oversubscribed - due no doubt to the local t00ls downloading christ knows what all day and night, so I'm 'for' something that tries to balance things out in favour of the occasional downloader like me (mostly US TV that you either don't get at all here, or have to wait a year to see) at the expense of the regular filesharer who rinses the UBR dry.

however, I think giving ISPs the legal power to do this (or not challenging it in court) is a very, very thorny area for my conscience. I DO regularly torrent .iso images of Linux distros and these can be pretty hefty. Lets not beat about the bush here, the reason Virgin are doing this isn't because of their customers, its as a sop to the BPI and FAST. I won't pass comment on the legitimacy or otherwise of filesharing - but I do think its a bit of a ****ing cheek that my download of a perfectly legitimate .iso that happens to be 2Gb in size may be throttled because Virgin want to get the copyright police off their back. In addition to that, the UK has the worst kind of Big Brother legislation outside of a fascist or communist state. In the last few months we've already seen Phorm get the go-ahead, legislation to detain people for 45 days without charge debated in the commons, and a new law that dictates what consenting adults can and cannot find sexually arousing in the name of 'decency' - legitimising this sort of activity by ISPs won't help that one bit.

Virgin should also come in for extra-special criticism since they spent about a gazillion squid of subscribers' money on getting Samuel L Jackson to tell the nation that everyone should sign up for Virgin broadband as it 'lets you download movies faster'. That'sa the ultimate piss-take - selling you something that you won't actually be able to use due to their usage policy!!

Truly a double-edged sword - and not an argument that is without merit on both sides.

Fortunately, its probably nigh-on impossible to implement - if you encrypt your torrents they can't view whats contained in them without some sort of SSL-handoff proxy - which would be frighteningly expensive to implement on such a grand scale and slow connections down to a crawl, preventing the BBC iPlayer from working and causing so many complaints from legit users of torrents and users of secure sites (internet banking anyone?) worried about their traffic being intercepted that any system based on Deep Inspection proxies would be kyboshed on day one. I guess they could start QoSing traffic more spitefully - say by prioritising TCP port 80 & 443 - but people would just set their torrent clients to use those ports, so that probably wouldn't work either.

Ho hum.

 

Whats your actual sync rate?

 

Statistics Downstream Upstream
Line Rate 192 Kbps 448 Kbps
Attainable Line Rate 480 Kbps 1196 Kbps
Noise Margin 32.9 dB 24.0 dB
Line Attenuation 29.5 dB 24.0 dB
Output Power 12.4 dBm 13.5 dBm

Normally it is around 4000 kbps downstream and around 700 kps upstream.