Adsl2+ - reduced overseas bandwidth?

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Adsl2+ - reduced overseas bandwidth?

newbellies

159 posts

Master Geek

#110214 5-Oct-2012 06:27

Hi guys,

I'm about 2 km away from the nearest cabinet, and i can achieve about 10Mbps down from here:
http://speedtest.telecom.co.nz

That's lower than it was initially after switching to that cabinet, but blazing compared to what it used to be. (i used to be on the exchange downtown, much further away)

But if I do tests to the Los Angeles server here:
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

I'm getting speeds of about 3.8 Mbps down. Although I know it would never be as fast as the NZ speedtest, I'm pretty sure I remember this number being significantly higher last time I ran tests. I've also noticed overseas VPN, skype and streaming video all having issues lately.

Just curious, anybody else noticing reduced overseas speeds? Also, I saw in one of these threads someone complaining that Telecom kept turning on interleaving everytime he switched plans. Is a phone call the only way to find out if interleaving is on?

Many thanks.

NonprayingMantis

6434 posts

Uber Geek

#696599 5-Oct-2012 09:34

1) Interleaving doesn't change the speed (materially). The biggest impact is to latency

2) speeds of ~4Mbps to the USA is pretty typical on a 10Mbps connection. If you remember it being much higher then you are probably mis-remembering or you just got incredibly lucky testing at a time when hardly anyone was using the internet in NZ

3) Skype, even video Skype, doesn't really require particularly high bandwidth to work well. I used to video call my parents in the UK on a 2Mbps ADSL1 connection and it worked just fine

4) to check interleaving just phone up 123 and ask.

newbellies

159 posts

Master Geek

#696917 5-Oct-2012 19:22

Thanks much for this reply. Very helpful.

DravidDavid

1907 posts

Uber Geek

#696994 5-Oct-2012 23:10

NonprayingMantis: 1) Interleaving doesn't change the speed (materially). The biggest impact is to latency

Some argue it decreases downstream when disabled, some argue it increases. I know when I had mine switched off with Telecom I went from Syncing at 21Mbps to 22.5Mbps, latency went from 30 to 50ms to single digits.

Zeon

3918 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#697011 6-Oct-2012 01:10

Removing interleaving will reduce latency which will help TCP throughput. Not sure how much but will help US transfers etc.

Speedtest 2019-10-14

Zeon

3918 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#697013 6-Oct-2012 01:20

BTW what's the area? I bet more than EOL can provide services for it.

Speedtest 2019-10-14