Showing posts with label cable. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cable. Show all posts

Friday, February 18, 2011

Canadian Bandwidth

Really bizarre as so many services move to the cloud or streaming that all of a sudden bandwidth is at a premium.   not bad enough that they sell you up to speeds that you'll never be able to sustain... without power boost and if your file is over the power boost limit it is unlikely you'll get more than 10-12.5% of your up to speed.  On the top package my bandwidth recently dropped 30%; cost drop: 0%.  Should ISP be involved in cable TV delivery, or even worse TV content delivery - conflict of interest... seems it's all about owning competing products and wanting customers to pay for them all.  What are the odds of getting a solid OTA signial from a company that owns the broadcaster and a cable company that can deliver the signal.  And then the cable box compresses your HD signal so it's not as good as OTA anyway.

Bandwith is not water... it is not finite.  Hope Leo doesn't mind, here is Americam Tom Merritt's take on the whole deal:



Check the whole episode here:

TWiT 287: Finckenstein's Monster

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Technology & Security

So you go to all the trouble to lock down your system
and look at the security you get from your providers lines!

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.