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On 27/07/10 15:07, Rob Beard wrote:
On 27/07/10 14:09, Julian Hall wrote:On 27/07/2010 13:14, James Andrews wrote: <snip>So the Internet has no "speed" that anyone can measure in bpsNo, but the point is - whatever your method of measuring speed - that if your initial connection is slow you cannot tx/rx data fast regardless of any external conditions. A mythical condition could exist where every external connection is 1000Gb[1], but it your connection is 1Gb (1000 times slower) that's all you're going to get, and that is where the UK system is failing consumers. More like BroadBLAND Britain than Broadband. Julian [1] Or however you choose to measure itOr on the other hand, your connection could be reasonably quick and the other end could be slow, or have a bottleneck. For instance I'm on Virgin 20Mbit broadband, I regularly get the full 20Mbit/sec from some hosts, but other hosts I can be limited to something like 300Kbit/sec. I only tend to find this with smaller sites, possibly hosted on the other side of the globe. The big sites such as Microsoft (yes I know!) I get the full 20Mbit. So it's not all down to the connection at the premises, it's also the connections to servers wherever they may be.
The bottleneck need not even be whatever you are communicating with. In order to get that 20M the server at the other end together with every link and router involved needs to have least 20M available for your traffic. Together with an unknown bandwidth/minimum delay in the other direction. If there is actually 20M available from the server to you, but the link from you to the server is so congested that it is dropping or taking a long time to route them you won't be able to use that 20M. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq