Question Regarding Slow Download Speeds with Telstra

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Jukon

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#60680 30-Apr-2010 11:34

Hi guys, I was wondering whether anyone would be able to give me some infromation regarding a problem that I am having. Currently I am staying at a Student Hall in Wellington, while attending University. My problem is that the broadband provided by the hall seems to be extremely slow. To the best of my knowledge, it is supposed to be 1 MBPS down, 1MBPS up, but I usually seem to get speeds drastically lower than that, as seen below.

I usually seem to get download speeds that are closer to 0.25 MBPS, and there is not much difference between peak and off-peak hours in terms of speed.

I have found the download speed to be consistent on both computers that I am using.

Any response would be greatly appreciated.

freitasm

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#325203 30-Apr-2010 11:51

The screenshot you posted is not "drastically" lower than 1.0Mbps. It's actually pretty close to it.

Also, you should test with Auckland servers, seeing that TelstraClear is not peering in Wellington so these results are not the best you'd see anyway.

In don't take too much when looking at speed tests. What they show is not what you get in real life. When you start downloading things, you have to consider distance from your PC to the server (if the server is in Europe it's obvious it will be slower than one next door to you). Also are you absolutely sure the server hosting the file you want is really capable of that speed? There's nothing your ISP can do if the server on he other side has poor connectivity anyway.

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freitasm

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#325204 30-Apr-2010 11:52

Also I am sure you are talking about 1Mbps (megabits per second), not 1MBps (megabytes per second). There's 8x difference in those two.

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Jukon

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#325255 30-Apr-2010 13:44

Thanks for the fast response. You were indeed correct regarding the 1 Mbps as opposed to 1 MBps.

I took your advice and tested my speeds using Auckland Servers. It was a marked improvement over the download speed for International downloading, as is most likely the norm. I suppose the ISP had meant that I would get 1 Mbps download speeds using national servers as opposed to international ones on the other side of the world.

On a different note, I had heard that it is sometimes possible to lower your ping during online gaming (on USA or European based servers) by using SSH tunneling software. Is it legal to do so?

Ragnor

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#325325 30-Apr-2010 15:44

Jukon: Thanks for the fast response. You were indeed correct regarding the 1 Mbps as opposed to 1 MBps.

I took your advice and tested my speeds using Auckland Servers. It was a marked improvement over the download speed for International downloading, as is most likely the norm. I suppose the ISP had meant that I would get 1 Mbps download speeds using national servers as opposed to international ones on the other side of the world.

On a different note, I had heard that it is sometimes possible to lower your ping during online gaming (on USA or European based servers) by using SSH tunneling software. Is it legal to do so?

Think of a residential grade ISP's capacity/speed as a motorway or highway, there's x users (cars) and y bandwidth (lanes), they are shared between whoever is using it at the time. You can't always go 100km at rush hour.

SSH tunnelling only really benefits mmo's like wow, aion etc - ones that use tcp/ip connections. See the FAQ for a provider for more details it, eg: http://www.wowtunnels.com/faqs#q5

I used wowtunnels for 2 years back when I used to play wow, no problems.. made a big difference to latency.

webwat

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#325456 30-Apr-2010 23:11

Jukon: Thanks for the fast response. You were indeed correct regarding the 1 Mbps as opposed to 1 MBps.

I took your advice and tested my speeds using Auckland Servers. It was a marked improvement over the download speed for International downloading, as is most likely the norm. I suppose the ISP had meant that I would get 1 Mbps download speeds using national servers as opposed to international ones on the other side of the world.

On a different note, I had heard that it is sometimes possible to lower your ping during online gaming (on USA or European based servers) by using SSH tunneling software. Is it legal to do so?

You cant improve the ICMP ping times without finding a way to make the speed of light faster, but switching to UDP packets should improve response times for everything else by eliminating the need for ACK packets that are normally required for downloads to make sure all the data arrives.

Time to find a new industry!

Jukon

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#325462 30-Apr-2010 23:33

Thank you both for the feedback regarding possible ways to lower response times. I have looked into both tunneling and some ACK solutions (one of which I hear involves telling windows to send ACK every time it receives a TCP package, rather than for every two packages, and also disabling packet batching), and I will see how they go. My main concern with tunneling services is that they seem to only really be for games like WoW.