broadband speeds question?

joe134

Hi, When I do a speed test my download speed can vary from 0.4 to 4 mbs. However my upload seems to stay at 0.3 or 0.4 never more.How does one know if the upload is good or bad? what,s the average.Why does it take longer to upload against down? Any advice would be appreciated.

da1seggy

This is normal, upload speeds will usually be much lower than downloading. The simple fact is downloading from the internet is more popular than uploading; ISP's set their priorities to reflect this.

Sparhawke

A general rule to stick to is your upload will generally be about 10% of your download and you should set uploads to various programs at about 80% of this, for instance:

If you have a 10mb tariff you will generally see downloads of about 700kb/s, you will see your upload at about 70kb/s....you should manually set it to about 60kb/s if you can so that your modem has room to breathe

If you happen to use various filesharing networks it will often give you an option to crank it up but it does not work and will simply slow you down as it bottlenecks as no information can get around the limit...much like an unlimited speed lane on a motorway; so many people are trying to get on it that everything around slows lol

So don't try to get around it lol

macman

joe134 wrote: »

Hi, When I do a speed test my download speed can vary from 0.4 to 4 mbs. However my upload seems to stay at 0.3 or 0.4 never more.How does one know if the upload is good or bad? what,s the average.Why does it take longer to upload against down? Any advice would be appreciated.

That's why it's called ADSL (Asynchrous Digital Subscriber Line). The down speed is faster than the up speed.

joe134

Sparhawke wrote: »

A general rule to stick to is your upload will generally be about 10% of your download and you should set uploads to various programs at about 80% of this, for instance:

If you have a 10mb tariff you will generally see downloads of about 700kb/s, you will see your upload at about 70kb/s....you should manually set it to about 60kb/s if you can so that your modem has room to breathe

If you happen to use various filesharing networks it will often give you an option to crank it up but it does not work and will simply slow you down as it bottlenecks as no information can get around the limit...much like an unlimited speed lane on a motorway; so many people are trying to get on it that everything around slows lol

So don't try to get around it lol

Hi, Thanks. The only uploading I do at present is attachments to e-mails, it seemed to take ages to upload a a4 page of text.Tried sending 2 pages via e-mail, said it was too much, so I had to split ,and send 2 e-mails with 1 a4 page on each, ok then.

kwikbreaks

joe134 wrote: »

Hi, Thanks. The only uploading I do at present is attachments to e-mails

That's no so. Every time you request a web page that's an upload or at least uses some of your upstream bandwidth.Of course your page request is a lot smaller than the page itself which gets sent to you and that is why the general situation for home broadband where there isn't a more equal exchange of data is that upstream speeds are lower than downstream.

Regarding the big variation in downstream speeds when you do speedtests - usually it is contention because your choice of ISP isn't providing sufficient capacity for the number of customers they have. This is typical for cheap ISPs providing a BTw based service because at the prices BTw charge they couldn't sell a decent service for the prices they charge. It is also typical for some cheapskate LLU ISPs who rely on long contracts rather than a good product.

If you can get ~ 80% download speed of what your router/modem reports it is syncing at you are not doing badly - the most you can ever get is ~ 84% because some of the data is in fact overhead used by the transmission protocols rather than data useful to you.

TonyMMM

joe134 wrote: »

Hi, Thanks. The only uploading I do at present is attachments to e-mails, it seemed to take ages to upload a a4 page of text.Tried sending 2 pages via e-mail, said it was too much, so I had to split ,and send 2 e-mails with 1 a4 page on each, ok then.

That sounds like the problem is the size (in Mb) of the attachments you are trying to send (many ISPs have a max size restriction for email attachments) - are you scanning these A4 pages and at what resoultion ? ....what format are they in, and how big are the files ?

kwikbreaks

They'll be huge image files from the scanner - probably TIFF.

If that is a problem that needs fixing (and it isn't what the original question was) then most scanners come with OCR software which convert the images of the text back into text (unfortunately often with errors that need correcting manually)