Can you slow down the internet?

[Terry Casey]

Is there a way of simulating slower speeds?

I know that many would like to speed it up but this is a serious question!

Our daughter is moving into a new flat. In her existing flat she has Virgin Media internet and, of course, gets very high speeds.

But VM don't serve the block she's moving to, so she will be at the mercy of whatever she csan get over a BT line.

BT say 'up to' 60 Mbs.

Her problem is that VM's entry level has gone up over the years from 50 to 100 and now 200 Mbps and now she is faced with a range of different speed offerings, she hasn't a clue how much bandwidth she actually needs.

So I was wondering if there is something she can install on her PC that can be set to simulate a range of speeds.

My idea is that she could then set it to simulate the lowest speed of all the packages available and see what happens when she uses her PC normally. If she has any problems, she can reset it to the next higher level and so on.

Having discussed her usage with her I think she would be happy with quite a low speed but, having experienced apalling speeds where she works (because it is in the country and a long way from civilisation) she is concerned that she might either choose a package that dosn't suit her or opt for a more expensive package than she really needs.

[Jethro_uk]

No direct help, but I have to admit that broadband provision would be as important a factor in locating a house as off-street parking.

I wonder if anyone knows if it's affected house prices ?

I know there were a couple of people I used to work with who were unable to work from home (which was their role) as their (BT) broadband wasn't up to the "5Mb minimum" that the IT guys insisted on for the VPN.

(That said, I had a shit experience with the VPN at 80MB/s, so I think that was an excuse).

[Brian Gaff]

Well all I can say is that a 3G mobile internet dongle cannot even reliably do good quality stereo radio.

In my view the used bandwidth at any one time should be built into routers as a measurement so you can look at logs and see the peeak over a certain time period. Brian

[Tim Streater]

What does she use it for? We are "out in the country" but get 35Mbps since we are on fibre-to-the-cabinet, with the cab being visible 400 yards down the road. I find that speed to be ample but HMMV.

Is what she is looking for an FTTC connection? It doesn't have to be with BT, anyway. I'd go with PlusNet or others.

[John Rumm]

The better broadband routers will include bandwidth management, but many of the basic ones handed out "free" by the ISPs lack these kinds of capabilities.

You could see if you can find and old 10Mb/s hub, and install that in the ethernet between her PC and router. Failing that you may be able to set the network interface to manual speed rather than auto negotiation to get 10 meg. If she copes with that, then any of the FTTC packages will likely be ok.

[Harry Bloomfield]

John Rumm laid this down on his screen :

We have just moved to FTTC at 39Mb/s, prior to that we had 15Mb/s over an entirely copper line. That coped fine with streaming, general browsing and a lot of text only and emails.

The move to FTTC has made little noticeable difference.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Im bloody glad to get 5Mbps. Its more than enough.

Sure get-iplayer takes hours to download BBC videos, but hey, that happens in background.

[Terry Casey]

In article <071220181819305072% [e-mail], [e-mail] says... .

Where she works is a centre for disabled children and brings them into contact with various animal, plants, etc. Probably originally a small farm - hardly a target for FTTC!

Apart from occasionally watch stuff on BBC iPlayer, not a lot that demands speed as far as I can tell - I've already suggested that she could download the stuff from iPlayer and watch it when it has loaded

FTTC would, I think, be overkill for her. She is not intending to use BT and is looking at several other providers

[Martin Brown]

I find that surprising as I get stable radio 3 even at 1Mbps. You do have to disable some router options on some models or the thing spends too much time doing housekeeping with "smart" peripherals.

Disabling UPNP made a world of difference to audio streaming stability. YMMV

Worst case Radio 3 needs 320kbps and a bit of buffering. Once I disabled the stupid time wasting features on the router internet radio and HD TV has been rock solid even on a 5M ADSL line. Sometimes at peak times it goes to buffering on video or crashes out on radio but very rarely.

[Martin Brown]

Not quite slowing down the internet but by using Wifi and choosing a location with the worst signal you can find you should be able to get a local link quality down to around 5Mbps. Unless she is into gaming where the ping response time can really matter most streaming things will do HD at 5Mpbs per channel and QD at 20Mbps. Contention is more of an issue than headline speed at peak times if everyone tries to watch online at once. (as happened in some of the summer World Cup mathches)

[Dave W]

I too am happy with the 5Mbps I get from the BT line. I can stream TV from iPlayer without hiccups, but I don't have others in the house trying to use it at the same time.

The upload speed is only 1Mbps, but I can use the 30Mbps upload speed in my public library for sending videos.

[87213]

Jethro_uk <jethro [e-mail] wrote

I havent seen any evidence that it does here and I have been paying close attention to the price houses sell for here.

It should, but no evidence that it does here.

Yeah, mate of mine does teaching online in china, from australia and they don?t let him do that with an inadequate broadband service.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes. Wot he said. I monitor traffic on my router using snmp and its <10kbps on a 'quiet' time. Watching videos or listening to the radio takes it up to the >1Mbs or >100k bps makrs respectively.

Most of the low level access traffic is things like NTP servers, and polls of various servers that the widgets I have enabled do - things like querying weather stations, or of course updates to Linux itself...

Only time I have streaming issues is when I download big mail web or updates. I COULD fix that probably by tampering with QOS settigs but why bother?

My conclusions are that whilst 2Mbps is a bit sordid, 4Mbps and above is very much OK for a single user and unless you have a house full of antisocial streaming kids, 10Mbps is way more than enugh for most.

I would love to have hiogher top seeds - epecially uplad - but not at te price charged as its only occasionally I even notice it - uploading big files to my servers or downloading videos from yer Beeb Iplayer.

[The Natural Philosopher]

My laptop occasionaly goes there all by otselkf, Bug in the chipset or drivers? rebooting fixes it BUT for some reason acess to the 5Mbps internet is WAY worse through a 5Mbps wifi link than it is via a better one. I vonclude taht e 5Mbps wifi is some kkind of raw speed anmd actual transfer speeds are way worse, so beware.

Unless she is into gaming where

Ping times to my won uK based servers are around 13ms

Ping times to the only game server I use, somwhere in Canada, are 80ms..

Yes, if you are with a shonky ISP like talktalk who skimps on it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Never thought of that...nice one

[Brian Gaff]

I often think that the problems are not so much the speed locally as the problems further down the line between other machines it has to pass through. I think the 3G dongle tends to have buffering and latency issues which makes the so called intelligent system flaky. This same rubbish happens with the old form of BT broadband over the phone lines as the speed varies and can drop out for a few seconds. Brian

[spuorgelgoog]

A friend has 2 Mb ADSL (rural area, long loop) and it's almost unusable for most things; even sending and receiving email is cumbersome.

We have 4 Mb to the desktop at work (incompetent IT) and it's sometimes unusable for Youtube.

I wouldn't accept anything less than 10 Mb for one person at home for general use. I can stream Youtube at 1080p comfortably on that and do other things at the same time.

You may be able to set your network card driver to 10 Mbps but that's Ethernet so not the same as DSL line speed.

Going back to the old days of dial-up and telnet, it's hard to read text at >4800bps anyway. Anything else is just network bloat.

Owain

[The Natural Philosopher]

shouldnt be.

Then its not a full oncontended 4Mbps

Well from Talktlak perhaps. But an independent ISP with low contention

4Mps is totrally ade2qyuet

[jrwalliker]

3G dongles have highly variable latency. When the data rate is low they switch to a different 2G operating mode with much longer latency than when the data rate is high. The problem with video streaming is that a buffer load of data is downloaded, then the connection is idle before the next buffer load is needed. In that time interval the 3G modem switches mode so the latency is much longer again when the next buffer is needed. All this latency switching really messes up the smooth flow of video data as the receiving software gets confused about when to ask for the next buffer load of data.

However, 4G dongles are far better in this respect and have relatively constant latency. It is sometimes necessary to force them to stay in 4G mode and not switch to 3G. Setting 4G-only mode can often be done in the dongle's user interface.

John

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Here, I don't think these very much higher speeds make any difference in practice. Certainly not from 60 to 200. Unless heavy multiple users. Is your daughter going to have flat mates?