Should you notice a change when you upgrade broadband

JimmyTheWig

If you took your car into the garage and they upped your top speed from, say, 120mph to 240mph would you get to Tesco any quicker?

My point is that the chances are that there are other things that are keeping the process slow.
I'm guessing a slow wireless connection or a slow PC itself.

Neil_Jones

Easiest way to look at things is if you imagine your internet is a pipe and you on the internet is running water.

On slow internet connections (like old-school dial-up) the "pipe" is small, ADSL ("normal" broadband) is a fatter pipe and fibre is fatter still. The even faster FTTP is the same principle with a fatter pipe.

Now consider your internet data (the running water). The more "water" you run through a narrow pipe, the sooner it fills up and takes longer to get out the other end. On fibre you can tip far more "water" down the "pipe" before it fills up and it will get through quicker.

For general internet surfing you won't notice a lot of difference between 8Mb ADSL and 38Mbps Fibre. You'll notice the speed more when you start downloading whopping great files, but not generally for day-to-day surfing.

esuhl

esuhl wrote: »

According to the following site, the average small webpage is approximately 12KB, while the more complex BBC homepage is around 158KB.
http://smallseotools.com/website-page-size-checker/

Well, never trust anything you read on the internet! I just found a page from The Register claiming that the average web page is actually 2,301KB... That's quite a difference. Can that really be right?!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/22/web_page_now_big_as_doom/

In that case, that would change the figures as follows:

An 8Mb/s connection could download a 2,301KB page in 2.3 seconds.
A 40Mb/s connection could download a 2,301KB page in 0.46 seconds.

So, I guess you would notice the difference... :-/ That surprises me, but maybe it's an indication of how incredibly bloated websites have become.

Oblivion

The biggest difference for me when I transferred from 2mbps ADSL to 50mbps Virgin cable was that previously youtube and BBC news video clips would constantly stall and buffer for ages whereas now I can stream anything without a hint of a pause.

Nilrem

esuhl wrote: »

Well, never trust anything you read on the internet! I just found a page from The Register claiming that the average web page is actually 2,301KB... That's quite a difference. Can that really be right?!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/22/web_page_now_big_as_doom/

In that case, that would change the figures as follows:

An 8Mb/s connection could download a 2,301KB page in 2.3 seconds.
A 40Mb/s connection could download a 2,301KB page in 0.46 seconds.

So, I guess you would notice the difference... :-/ That surprises me, but maybe it's an indication of how incredibly bloated websites have become.

That sounds more realistic, given that for example the BBC home page has a bunch of images on it, which I very much doubt come to under the 100k or so described in the test.

My suspicion of tha figure is that it's the images and content specifically from the home page, not anything linked (and showing) from other pages.

This page from the MSE forums (as of my post) downloads to be over 1.3MB.
The BBC.co.uk page comes in at 1.45mb at the moment, and neither of thse two examples are particularly busy, for example the BBC page doesn't have any adverts or moving content on it at the moment (which can easily increase the page size by 3-5 times).

esuhl

Nilrem wrote: »

My suspicion of tha figure is that it's the images and content specifically from the home page, not anything linked (and showing) from other pages.

Yeah... maybe the script just counts the number of bytes used by HTML and ignores other objects.

Nilrem wrote: »

This page from the MSE forums (as of my post) downloads to be over 1.3MB.
The BBC.co.uk page comes in at 1.45mb at the moment, and neither of thse two examples are particularly busy, for example the BBC page doesn't have any adverts or moving content on it at the moment (which can easily increase the page size by 3-5 times).

Interesting. How did you confirm the size of the MSE forum page?

jenniewb

Don't forget that if your computer is running slow, it wont matter how much money you throw at a faster broadband speed, it wont make the computer work faster. I noticed the biggest change in speed when I changed my PC after my last one died, then the biggest change again when I cut the virus protection for a few days before changing it (when it slowed again). My broadband was noticeably speeded up when I checked on an online test (it went from 13.5 to 17mb when I moved from Talktalk to O2) but the only difference I noticed was that it stopped dropping out every other hour.

If you check via a broadband speed checker, check at a time you use the broadband as if yours is anything like mine, it gets throttled during peak times and a lot at the weekend. If you are sure the broadband is faster and you are not seeing a difference, try a different virus protection and also see if there is anything on your computer/Mac/laptop or whatever you're using which could be slowing it down (eg apps or software running in the background, spyware, adware or similar or even things updating in the background without you knowing.)

Nilrem

esuhl wrote: »

Yeah... maybe the script just counts the number of bytes used by HTML and ignores other objects.



Interesting. How did you confirm the size of the MSE forum page?

Right click, save as and tell it to save to a folder on the desktop
You can then right click on the folder and it'll tell you the size of it's contents.

It's a trick I've used a lot of times to save useful information on forums (it saves pretty much everything needed for that page locally). If you're ever doing DIY or similar and find a useful page it's a handy way to keep a copy.

I used to do it for a lot of model making stuff, as some of the guides disappear whenever the site has a make over (one of the biggest names in wargaming basically threw away over a decade's worth of guides by staff on how to do things when they redid their site).

Terry98

Nilrem wrote: »

Right click, save as and tell it to save to a folder on the desktop
You can then right click on the folder and it'll tell you the size of it's contents.

Great tip thanks. I tried it using Opera and the download stalled twice at 90% and would not complete. No problem using Chrome.