Comprehensively dumbed down speed test for consumers to beat up theirISP with

"Andy Burns" wrote in message
...
Andy Furniss wrote:

I notice that their website for the "good honest Yorkshire broadband"
makes no mention of upload speed and on the 38 meg product has the words
"perfect for uploading":-(

Ooh, that's nasty.

I am an 80/20 customer and Plusnet is OK for me, I would once have
recommended them, but wouldn't now because of this "hidden" change.

Same here, I couldn't justify 80/20 to most friends/family, but I'm sure
as hell not going to recommend 40/2.

We have Plusnet "fibre broadband" (ie VDSL) and I don't know what speeds are
promised for our address but we actually get about 40/8 which is good
enough. OK, 1 Gb up and down would be nice (!) but 40/8 is good enough. I
don't notice the improvement over our previous 8/0.5 ADSL for normal web
browsing, but it is a great deal faster for downloading large files (eg
installation files) and the improvement in upload speed (eg when sending a
large email or when FTPing a large file) is fantastic - I think the
increased upload speed from 0.5 to 8 is more noticeable on a day-to-day
basis than the increased download from 8 to 40.

Now all I need to do is get a filtered faceplate to replace the dual BT/RJ11
faceplate on the BT master socket - because with that plugged in and the
extension house wiring in circuit, the speed drops dramatically, so I need
to connect the extension wiring on the filtered side. Much more importantly,
it would make the socket look neater than with the faceplate removed and the
router/phone socket plugged directly into the test socket - SWMBO is
starting to complain.

Andy Burns wrote:
Andy Furniss wrote:

I notice that their website for the "good honest Yorkshire broadband"
makes no mention of upload speed and on the 38 meg product has the words
"perfect for uploading":-(

Ooh, that's nasty.

I am an 80/20 customer and Plusnet is OK for me, I would once have
recommended them, but wouldn't now because of this "hidden" change.

Same here, I couldn't justify 80/20 to most friends/family, but I'm sure
as hell not going to recommend 40/2.

By "40/2" do you mean 40Mbps download and 2Mbps upload?

I'm somewhat intrigued to know why 40/2 is such bad news, upload-wise.
FWIW speedtest.net rates my connection at 16/0.9 and that's more than
adequate for our needs. I'm not saying if it's good enough for me it
should be good enough for anyone, but I look after several web sites so
I do a fair amount of uploading, and 0.9Mbps upload is more than
adequate. So what are your family/friends likely to be uploading? I'm
probably a bit out of touch with how your average family uses the
internet, and would like to be informed.

--
Mike Barnes
Cheshire, England

Mike Barnes wrote:
Andy Burns wrote:
Andy Furniss wrote:

I notice that their website for the "good honest Yorkshire broadband"
makes no mention of upload speed and on the 38 meg product has the words
"perfect for uploading":-(

Ooh, that's nasty.

I am an 80/20 customer and Plusnet is OK for me, I would once have
recommended them, but wouldn't now because of this "hidden" change.

Same here, I couldn't justify 80/20 to most friends/family, but I'm sure
as hell not going to recommend 40/2.

By "40/2" do you mean 40Mbps download and 2Mbps upload?

I'm somewhat intrigued to know why 40/2 is such bad news, upload-wise.
FWIW speedtest.net rates my connection at 16/0.9 and that's more than
adequate for our needs. I'm not saying if it's good enough for me it
should be good enough for anyone, but I look after several web sites so
I do a fair amount of uploading, and 0.9Mbps upload is more than
adequate. So what are your family/friends likely to be uploading? I'm
probably a bit out of touch with how your average family uses the
internet, and would like to be informed.


I have several naive users who complain about the length of time it
takes their PC to send email. When I investigate it always transpires
that they are sending pictures or scanned documents at unreasonably
large resolutions, or (for documents) inappropriate formats such as
..BMP. So emails that one would expect to be about a megabyte are often
tens of megabytes - and at typical 448k upload speeds do indeed take a
long while. The users then compound the situation by trying to send the
same material again because a phone call to the recipient reveals that
the email has not yet arrived.

Another issue is users with iThings connected to the cloud - they get
home, the device connects itself to their WiFi, and starts to upload the
selfies or whatever photos they've taken. The user then complains that
the deskop PC has abysmal internet connection speed. I investigate, and
(with a good router such as a Vigor 2830) I can see the iThing
saturating the upload channel - so blocking the ACK packets for the
download channel. So I set the iThing to have a fixed IP address (by
Mac-IP binding in the router) and limit the bandwidth it is allowed to use.

Online backup mechanisms give the same problem. Correct configuration
can help.

But in general, a fast upload speed would help many users; and avoid
their need to understand the details of how their system works - always
a challenge!

--
Graham J

Graham J wrote:
Mike Barnes wrote:
Andy Burns wrote:
Andy Furniss wrote:

I notice that their website for the "good honest Yorkshire
broadband" makes no mention of upload speed and on the 38 meg
product has the words "perfect for uploading":-(

Ooh, that's nasty.

I am an 80/20 customer and Plusnet is OK for me, I would once
have recommended them, but wouldn't now because of this
"hidden" change.

Same here, I couldn't justify 80/20 to most friends/family, but
I'm sure as hell not going to recommend 40/2.

By "40/2" do you mean 40Mbps download and 2Mbps upload?

I'm somewhat intrigued to know why 40/2 is such bad news,
upload-wise. FWIW speedtest.net rates my connection at 16/0.9 and
that's more than adequate for our needs. I'm not saying if it's
good enough for me it should be good enough for anyone, but I look
after several web sites so I do a fair amount of uploading, and
0.9Mbps upload is more than adequate. So what are your
family/friends likely to be uploading? I'm probably a bit out of
touch with how your average family uses the internet, and would
like to be informed.


I have several naive users who complain about the length of time it
takes their PC to send email. When I investigate it always
transpires that they are sending pictures or scanned documents at
unreasonably large resolutions, or (for documents) inappropriate
formats such as .BMP. So emails that one would expect to be about a
megabyte are often tens of megabytes - and at typical 448k upload
speeds do indeed take a long while. The users then compound the
situation by trying to send the same material again because a phone
call to the recipient reveals that the email has not yet arrived.

I see. Nothing to do with the original question, but I think most email
software I've come across performs abysmally when it comes to warning
users that they're probably doing something daft. They accept stupidly
large attachments without a murmur. Also, entirely differently, they
don't make it anywhere near obvious enough that a message is going out
to a large number of recipients.

Another issue is users with iThings connected to the cloud - they get
home, the device connects itself to their WiFi, and starts to upload
the selfies or whatever photos they've taken. The user then
complains that the deskop PC has abysmal internet connection speed.
I investigate, and (with a good router such as a Vigor 2830) I can
see the iThing saturating the upload channel - so blocking the ACK
packets for the download channel. So I set the iThing to have a fixed
IP address (by Mac-IP binding in the router) and limit the bandwidth
it is allowed to use.

I'm surprised to hear that uploading affects the download speed in that
way, but I've taken note - thanks. The iCloud Photo Stream gets a lot of
use here and I can't say I've noticed any impact - I'll keep an eye open
in future.

Online backup mechanisms give the same problem. Correct
configuration can help.

Yes, I hadn't thought of that, but again I'm surprised that it affects
download speed or responsiveness.

But in general, a fast upload speed would help many users; and avoid
their need to understand the details of how their system works -
always a challenge!

Thanks, v interesting.

--
Mike Barnes
Cheshire, England

On Tue, 24 May 2016 21:56:25 +0100, "NY" wrote:


We have Plusnet "fibre broadband" (ie VDSL) and I don't know what speeds are
promised for our address but we actually get about 40/8 which is good
enough. OK, 1 Gb up and down would be nice (!) but 40/8 is good enough.

Why would it be nice? If you had 1Gb/s up and down, what would you do
with it that you can't do already?

Rod.

On Tue, 24 May 2016 21:28:18 +0100, "Norman Wells"
wrote:

"Roderick Stewart" wrote in message
.. .
On Tue, 24 May 2016 19:12:26 +0100, "Norman Wells"
wrote:
"Roderick Stewart" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 24 May 2016 17:46:31 +0100, "Norman Wells"
wrote:

As my next-door neighbour pointed out, if you have 2 teenagers in the house
4 or 5 Mbps is insufficient.

40 to 50 Mbps could well be insufficient if it's accompanied by an
inadequate upstream channel which those teenagers are saturating by
swapping large files such as video clips or gaming software.

There's more to the internet than just watching stuff, but for
historical reasons most services are so asymmetrical that you have to
opt for ridiculous downstream rates in order to get usable upstream.

You don't think it's right then that those who monopolise a valuable
technological
resource for utterly inane purposes should pay a premium for that?

It's nothing to do with monopolising anything. It doesn't seem right
that a 10-20Mb/s ADSL downstream channel can be brought to a
standstill by means of 1Mb/s worth of traffic in the opposite
direction. I'd say it was bad design if I didn't know the historical
reasons for it. I don't know how easy it would be to correct it.

At one time, that degree of asymmetry may have made sense in terms of
typical usage, as the vast majority of the traffic would have been
downstream, very few people having the means to generate anything
other than text emails or commands to send upstream. But then we
invented digital video cameras and made them cheap enough for
everybody to have one in their pocket, and then video sharing
websites, and blogs, and selfies etc, and an entire subculture that
never existed before now generates masses of material that they all
want to share with the world, so the capacity of the upstream channel
has now become very important.

Only to them. The rest of us regard it as a complete waste of all four
dimensions,
and probably think any constraint placed on it would actually be A Good Thing.

There are a lot of things that I regard as a waste of time, but which
other people like, and I don't reckon it's up to me to judge their use
of their time if they're paying for the service.

But they're not paying for it. The 'entire subculture that never existed before'
that 'now generates masses of material that they all want to share with the world'
are teenagers. They get someone else to pay. It's a well-known fact.

Maybe their parents are paying for it then. At any rate, I'm not, so I
don't care. Whoever is paying for it, someone else's use of someone
else's internet service is none of my business and beside the point.

Which is... that an asymmetric internet service is a badly matched set
of parameters in relation to typical modern usage, because we are no
longer just "punters" buying "content" and only using the upstream
channel to signal what we want. A great many users are creating their
own content now, and whatever you or I think of that, if it's their
internet service they're perfectly entitled to do it.

If they're willing to pay, fine. But don't try to kid me they're 'creating their
own content' as if it was worth something when it's clearly not. It's dross. You
know that, I know that, everyone knows that. And it's a waste of time and space.

No, I don't know that. How do you know it? How do you define dross? Is
your definition the same as everybody else's? Who are you to judge?

There's a vast amount of amateur material online, Youtube being
probably the most popular example. It varies enormously in content and
technical quality, which makes it quite unlike television as we know
it, i.e. "mainstream" broadcasting, but this is the most valuable
thing about it. No longer is the public expression of a point of view,
or the demonstration of something that somebody cares about, only
limited to those who have access to broadcasting facilities (which
usually starts with money) and no longer need it be subject to anyone
else's editorial judgement. I will readily admit that not all of this
is to my personal taste, but who am I to judge? So far, it looks like
the best approximation to true democratic freedom of speech that's
ever been achieved. It's not like broadcasting, but why should it be?

There are lots of other potential uses that don't assume the material
is intended for public perusal. For example, I was recently at the
home of one of my daughters to celebrate a granddaughter's birthday,
and thanks to the availability of video-capable internet bandwidth, I
was able to use my phone to take a video clip of the blowing out of
the candles and send it to my other daughter who lives hundreds of
miles away. Within minutes, there was a reply, consisting of a video
clip of my grandson singing the happy birthday song. This sort of
thing is effortless nowadays, and you may think it trivial, but the
immediacy of it brings people together as never before.

Rod.

On Wed, 25 May 2016 08:30:55 +0100, Mike Barnes
wrote:

Another issue is users with iThings connected to the cloud - they get
home, the device connects itself to their WiFi, and starts to upload
the selfies or whatever photos they've taken. The user then
complains that the deskop PC has abysmal internet connection speed.
I investigate, and (with a good router such as a Vigor 2830) I can
see the iThing saturating the upload channel - so blocking the ACK
packets for the download channel. So I set the iThing to have a fixed
IP address (by Mac-IP binding in the router) and limit the bandwidth
it is allowed to use.

I'm surprised to hear that uploading affects the download speed in that
way, but I've taken note - thanks. The iCloud Photo Stream gets a lot of
use here and I can't say I've noticed any impact - I'll keep an eye open
in future.

Online backup mechanisms give the same problem. Correct
configuration can help.

Yes, I hadn't thought of that, but again I'm surprised that it affects
download speed or responsiveness.

Downstream would normally only be affected if the upstream channel is
actually saturated, i.e. loaded to its fullest extent. I don't know
all the details but I understand that TCP/IP is a two-way protocol
dependent to some extent on handshaking, which of course would be
hampered if communication is effectivily blocked in one direction,
even if it's not the direction you want to use. The upstream channel
is more likely to become overloaded in this way because its carrying
capacity is almost invariably smaller, sometimes a lot smaller.

Offline backup or storage, torrent sharing, or the uploading of videos
to sites like Youtube, are all examples of the sort of activity that
can sometimes do this. Even if you have what you think of as a fast
internet connection it may not take much to hobble it.

Rod.

"Martin" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 25 May 2016 12:02:55 +0100, Roderick Stewart
wrote:

On Tue, 24 May 2016 21:28:18 +0100, "Norman Wells"
wrote:

"Roderick Stewart" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 24 May 2016 19:12:26 +0100, "Norman Wells"
wrote:
"Roderick Stewart" wrote in message
om...
On Tue, 24 May 2016 17:46:31 +0100, "Norman Wells"
wrote:

As my next-door neighbour pointed out, if you have 2 teenagers in the
house
4 or 5 Mbps is insufficient.

40 to 50 Mbps could well be insufficient if it's accompanied by an
inadequate upstream channel which those teenagers are saturating by
swapping large files such as video clips or gaming software.

There's more to the internet than just watching stuff, but for
historical reasons most services are so asymmetrical that you have to
opt for ridiculous downstream rates in order to get usable upstream.

You don't think it's right then that those who monopolise a valuable
technological
resource for utterly inane purposes should pay a premium for that?

It's nothing to do with monopolising anything. It doesn't seem right
that a 10-20Mb/s ADSL downstream channel can be brought to a
standstill by means of 1Mb/s worth of traffic in the opposite
direction. I'd say it was bad design if I didn't know the historical
reasons for it. I don't know how easy it would be to correct it.

At one time, that degree of asymmetry may have made sense in terms of
typical usage, as the vast majority of the traffic would have been
downstream, very few people having the means to generate anything
other than text emails or commands to send upstream. But then we
invented digital video cameras and made them cheap enough for
everybody to have one in their pocket, and then video sharing
websites, and blogs, and selfies etc, and an entire subculture that
never existed before now generates masses of material that they all
want to share with the world, so the capacity of the upstream channel
has now become very important.

Only to them. The rest of us regard it as a complete waste of all four
dimensions,
and probably think any constraint placed on it would actually be A Good
Thing.

There are a lot of things that I regard as a waste of time, but which
other people like, and I don't reckon it's up to me to judge their use
of their time if they're paying for the service.

But they're not paying for it. The 'entire subculture that never existed
before'
that 'now generates masses of material that they all want to share with the
world'
are teenagers. They get someone else to pay. It's a well-known fact.

Maybe their parents are paying for it then. At any rate, I'm not, so I
don't care. Whoever is paying for it, someone else's use of someone
else's internet service is none of my business and beside the point.

Which is... that an asymmetric internet service is a badly matched set
of parameters in relation to typical modern usage, because we are no
longer just "punters" buying "content" and only using the upstream
channel to signal what we want. A great many users are creating their
own content now, and whatever you or I think of that, if it's their
internet service they're perfectly entitled to do it.

If they're willing to pay, fine. But don't try to kid me they're 'creating their
own content' as if it was worth something when it's clearly not. It's dross.
You
know that, I know that, everyone knows that. And it's a waste of time and space.

No, I don't know that. How do you know it? How do you define dross? Is
your definition the same as everybody else's? Who are you to judge?

There's a vast amount of amateur material online, Youtube being
probably the most popular example. It varies enormously in content and
technical quality, which makes it quite unlike television as we know
it, i.e. "mainstream" broadcasting, but this is the most valuable
thing about it. No longer is the public expression of a point of view,
or the demonstration of something that somebody cares about, only
limited to those who have access to broadcasting facilities (which
usually starts with money) and no longer need it be subject to anyone
else's editorial judgement. I will readily admit that not all of this
is to my personal taste, but who am I to judge? So far, it looks like
the best approximation to true democratic freedom of speech that's
ever been achieved. It's not like broadcasting, but why should it be?

There are lots of other potential uses that don't assume the material
is intended for public perusal. For example, I was recently at the
home of one of my daughters to celebrate a granddaughter's birthday,
and thanks to the availability of video-capable internet bandwidth, I
was able to use my phone to take a video clip of the blowing out of
the candles and send it to my other daughter who lives hundreds of
miles away. Within minutes, there was a reply, consisting of a video
clip of my grandson singing the happy birthday song. This sort of
thing is effortless nowadays, and you may think it trivial, but the
immediacy of it brings people together as never before.

I couldn't agree more. We do similar things. It brings family members and
friends living far apart closer together.

Actually, it keeps them apart, as it obviously did in the story above. Why visit if
you can Skype?

But let that pass. This is not a story of teenagers, ie the 'entire subculture that
never existed before' that 'now generates masses of material that they all want to
share with the world', but adults, parents even, who are proudly sharing a special
occasion. That's fine, but it's not the average puerile banality I was talking
about.

Mike Barnes wrote:


I'm surprised to hear that uploading affects the download speed in that
way, but I've taken note - thanks. The iCloud Photo Stream gets a lot of
use here and I can't say I've noticed any impact - I'll keep an eye open
in future.

Online backup mechanisms give the same problem. Correct
configuration can help.

Yes, I hadn't thought of that, but again I'm surprised that it affects
download speed or responsiveness.

See the description at:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/...=ws.10%29.aspx

Most traffic on the internet is carried using the TCP/IP protocol. In
this protocol every packet that is sent is acknowledged. To quote, this
is "... a reliable, connection-oriented delivery service."

Put very simply, if you request a web page from a site on the internet
that site sends packets which contain payloads - the payloads are
assembled to tell your browser how to render the page. For ADSL these
packets are sent at the "download" speed, so fairly fast. The TCP/IP
protocol at the sending end expects a response (ACK) to every packet.
This response is returned at the "upload" speed, so much slower. But if
the upload channel is already used by other traffic - your backup
process, for example, the ACK packets - although tiny - can be
significantly delayed.

So the "download" process is delayed while the relevant ACK responses
are received. This has the effect of making the web page appear more
slowly than the raw download speed would suggest.

The original justification for the asymmetry of a domestic internet
connection was that the greatest volume of traffic would be in the
"download" direction. Indeed, for a user browsing the web that would
generally be true. The upload traffic would be a few keystrokes to
navigate to the site, the download traffic would be the content of the
desired websites.

However with on-line backups, uploads to the Cloud, and similar
requirements, a more symmetrical connection would be seen as an
advantage by many users.

--
Graham J

On Wed, 25 May 2016 14:29:37 +0100, "Norman Wells"
wrote:

There are lots of other potential uses that don't assume the material
is intended for public perusal. For example, I was recently at the
home of one of my daughters to celebrate a granddaughter's birthday,
and thanks to the availability of video-capable internet bandwidth, I
was able to use my phone to take a video clip of the blowing out of
the candles and send it to my other daughter who lives hundreds of
miles away. Within minutes, there was a reply, consisting of a video
clip of my grandson singing the happy birthday song. This sort of
thing is effortless nowadays, and you may think it trivial, but the
immediacy of it brings people together as never before.

I couldn't agree more. We do similar things. It brings family members and
friends living far apart closer together.

Actually, it keeps them apart, as it obviously did in the story above. Why visit if
you can Skype?

Sometimes we do visit them. Sometimes they visit us. A few generations
previously, I recall that people used telephones instead of Skype, and
the trains ran on steam, but in principle it was all much the same.
Visits unavoidably have to be less frequent than remote contact
because they're more expensive and take more organising, but we still
do them. Live video is a big improvement on voice-only, particularly
for very small children who seem to find the concept of talking to
someone who is elsewhere much easier to grasp if you can see them as
well as hear them. Electronics never can be or will be a substitute
for personal contact, but it can fill in some gaps.

Rod.