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On Mon, 6 Dec 2010, tom wrote:
On 06/12/10 15:30, Gordon Henderson wrote:
Have a look at groklaw you get massive pages with huge threads that take a long while to load - but most of the time your just reading the top 20 lines of the page and the difference between 512k and 8 gazzilion is purely academical. By metric sites I mean google analytics and the such - sites that slow down overall page loading times but provide no useful content.Namesco. I'm getting 150kbps consistently. Which is just under 3* what I got before. I just doesn't make a useful difference for general use. Pages load fractionally faster - but there's still all that latency with various metric sites and I cant read the top bit of a page fast enough to worry about the rest not having loaded yet.Not sure I get what you're on about here!
Right. Here was me thinking "metric tonne", or some sort of measurement issues!
Yea, slashdot does that too. PITA, but that's web 2orea for you. Just think what it'll be like when you get your guaranteed 2Mb/sec ;-)
However, sites with off-site content (e.g. google analytics and so-on) really ought to be fast and snappy to load - else the site owners start to notice and whinge at google and the other content delivery networks they are using.. One thing that helps hugely here is running your own caching DNS resolver. Running a local squid is good too. I do both and I'm on an 8Mb connection - however the slow-bit for me is my dual-core HT 1.6GHz processor which firefox only seems to be able ot use one core off )-:
I dont do a lot of downloads and most of what I do do is managed so the fact it only takes 20minutes overnight rather that an hour is neither here nor there. Videos from the Beeb suffer from the beeb bottleneck still - I've seen this on pipes.Use get_iplayer... And if they give you uncapped bandwidth overnight, then use 'at' or run a cronjob to get them for you...
most of the stuff I probably dont want to look at all the way through - one of the greatest bugbears of the internet is Parkinsons Law applies bigtime. With the beeb stuff I normally have to wait while flash player and the beeb get to talking and then I realise the video I'm watching is 99% padded - a 10 second clip of someone falling in the snow with 5 minutes of studio introduction and 2 minutes of credits - it only takes a few seconds of watching to realise its not worth the effort and get_iplayer just wastes quota. Like pdf files - 4.5meg to read two lines on page 47.
Hm. Not sure what the solution there might be though. However if you've now for 1.5Mb/sec (and you're only guaranteed that for 70% of the time IIRC) then it should still be able to fast forward, etc.
For me as a home user its simply not worth it and I do wonder whether it genuinely improves peoples 'internet experience' or if its not a bit 'must have but dont know why'. OK if I had a few kids playing online games at home it might help but my fear is that it will merely be clogged up by glister with ever decreasing content ratio.Its nice to have but I wouldnt pay more for it!That's the biggest issue - no-one wants to pay what it really costs ... ISP margins are
It's hard for me to say - and I've been whigned at before for whinging at the cheapskates! My family/relatives are all on 30GB packages which cost a shade under £20 and my sister in-law does reach that quota every now and then - but they do a lot of iPlayer stuff (etc) in the evenings (off-peak on the residential packages doesn't start until midnight)
*really* tight and they get screwed tighter all the time by BT. I think it's cirtually impossible for a new ISP to get started these days - not without a wodge of funding from somewhere - who'll want their investment back at some point! My fear is that like what happened to the cable co's, we'll end up with one or 2 mega ISPs with > 90% of the coverage giving 10% of the service )-:GordonThats capitalism for you.
Yes, and ultimately the consumer suffers. Thankfully I have the ability to vote for quality rather than quantity - something I pick whenever I can.
Gordon
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