bladefixation2
Gold Member
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2004
- Messages
- 1,391
The thing to remember with your Internet connection is there are a wide range of things that could affect the available bandwidth to you at any one time.
1. Its a contended connection, so your cable or DSL connection will be shared with other people who live near you. For domestic DSL its usually 50:1 contention, which means that for your theoretical 8Mbps (or whatever) pipe there may be up to 50 other people sharing. If no one else is using the internet apart from you then your performance will be good. If everyone in your neighborhood is downlaoding Windows 7 Beta then you might as well forget it as you will get 1/50th of the available bandwidth if youre lucky. Maybe someone was bittorrenting Beach Babes 3 when you ran it last time and they were busy watching it and not downloading anything when you just tried it.
2. Once your traffic leaves your ISP its out in the wild public Internet. An Internet backbone link could be down causing a bottleneck when you tried last time. Some Ruski could have been aiming their botnet at someone in the US, consuming bandwith. 50,000 people could have decided they all want to run a speed test and oversubscribed the speedtest website server or Internet connection.
3. Wireless is shared and also it runs on a commonly used frequency. Maybe someone else was using something that interfered, causing packet loss and retransmission. Maybe your next door neighbor was cooking a microwave pizza. Microwaves are notorious for interfering with wifi, but there are many other sources of interference too.
1. Its a contended connection, so your cable or DSL connection will be shared with other people who live near you. For domestic DSL its usually 50:1 contention, which means that for your theoretical 8Mbps (or whatever) pipe there may be up to 50 other people sharing. If no one else is using the internet apart from you then your performance will be good. If everyone in your neighborhood is downlaoding Windows 7 Beta then you might as well forget it as you will get 1/50th of the available bandwidth if youre lucky. Maybe someone was bittorrenting Beach Babes 3 when you ran it last time and they were busy watching it and not downloading anything when you just tried it.
2. Once your traffic leaves your ISP its out in the wild public Internet. An Internet backbone link could be down causing a bottleneck when you tried last time. Some Ruski could have been aiming their botnet at someone in the US, consuming bandwith. 50,000 people could have decided they all want to run a speed test and oversubscribed the speedtest website server or Internet connection.
3. Wireless is shared and also it runs on a commonly used frequency. Maybe someone else was using something that interfered, causing packet loss and retransmission. Maybe your next door neighbor was cooking a microwave pizza. Microwaves are notorious for interfering with wifi, but there are many other sources of interference too.
