Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Calculating your real bandwidth speed.

As a rule of thumb:
Given a broadband line speed, dividing by 5 and taking off 25% is a reasonable estimate of the maximum likely data download speeds (in bytes of data).
My connection: Rate from ISP 10 mb/s = (10/5)-25% = 1.75 mb/s

TCP has an overhead in transmission that can be about 5-10%, but ATM overhead has a 15% overhead. So you can expect to lose up to 25% of your purchased speed at when counting application data transfer rate.

There are additional factors affecting the throughput results. There are applications running that usually take up a small amount of bandwidth to communicate with their servers, therefore only the remaining bandwidth is available for your downloads.

The Operating System TCP settings will also affect the results because it is usually not optimized. Visit http://www.dslreports.com for further information on optimizing your TCP settings.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Another recommended security add-on

AVG LinkScanner

Download (Direct)
Download (from Download.com)

Free
Windows Vista, Windows 2000, Windows XP
* Additional Requirements:
Firefox or Internet Explorer

Publisher's description of AVG LinkScanner
From AVG Technologies USA:

There are millions of poisoned web pages out there. Let AVG LinkScanner check them out first. AVG LinkScanner looks for threats on every link you click in real time, before you get there. If a link is dangerous, you'll be protected. And it runs alongside other security software.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

SkyDrive… Microsoft’s “FREE” storage in the cloud!

25 GB of free storage on Windows Live

SkyDrive

Store and share your files and photos with almost anyone.

Wonder if Google will try to outshoot the competition again. Assuming the same leap they gave us in email storage, the “G Cloud” would have about 250GB.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Throttling - All Major Canadian ISPs Slow Down P2P Traffic

RE: All Major Canadian ISPs Slow Down P2P Traffic

FROM Shaw:

PowerBoost™ is a great feature from Shaw that allows you a 5 to 20 second burst of downloading speed by temporarily increasing your available bandwidth. Now you can download music, pictures, videos and small software updates even faster with Shaw’s PowerBoost.

PowerBoost also improves the page-loading process, so when you visit a media-intensive Web site the page opens faster, saving you even more time.

Below is a comparison of Shaw High-Speed and Shaw
Xtreme-I average download speeds* with and without PowerBoost.

File Size | Shaw High-Speed | Shaw High-Speed with PowerBoost
5 MB | 9.1 seconds | 2.6 seconds
10 MB | 27.3 seconds | 8 seconds
15 MB | 45.5 seconds | 21.2 seconds
100 MB | 2.7 minutes | 2.4 minutes
500 MB | 13.7 minutes | 13.3 minutes

File Size | Shaw Xtreme-I | Shaw Xtreme-I with PowerBoost
5 MB | 4.6 seconds | 2.6 seconds
10 MB | 13.7 seconds | 7 seconds
15 MB | 22.8 seconds | 12.8 seconds
100 MB | 1.4 minutes | 1.1 minutes
500 MB | 6.8 minutes | 6.6 minutes

PowerBoost is included with Xtreme-I service and is available to Shaw High-Speed Internet customers for $2.95 per month.

My $0.02:

It takes about 12 minutes for 700MB with Xtreme-I so there numbers are fairly accurate, but they tell you that you get better speed for up to 20 seconds [about 50MB] and then, since your speed drops dramatically they obviously throttle you. Without any throttling, the same 700MB would take about 70 seconds. Since Shaw lays out the speeds you get and they are alright, you can't really complain... and Telus speeds are depending on old phone lines for speed, so location is important in determining the speed you will get and it is unlikely you will get the same speed as with cable. Cable is more robust, the phone lines are already topping out baud rates and so they can't give you more speed.