Uploading files makes broadband unusable on Sky

Raxiel

OK so I did a bit more testing myself.

I'm now not sure I have the same issue (or if it is the same, it's not related to Sky). My issue appears to be with Powerline Ethernet.

While my PC was backing up the 'net was unusable as usual. Eventually managed to get a speedtest.net page up but it wouldn't run. Meanwhile the other PC (on true Ethernet) was fine, with normal latency and a reasonable amount of bandwidth.
Then I killed the Powerline, forcing my machine onto Wi-Fi, and it started behaving itself too!

So it looks like, untill I can run actual Ethernet, i'll have to use Wi-Fi more often. (Powerline is still better for the steam link though)

onomatopoeia99

Tarambor wrote: »

Really it isn't and most certainly not to the point it stops any use of the internet at all whilst you are doing it.

Actually it can. If an application starts doing multi-threaded uploads it can flood the upstream capacity and the acknowledgments that TCP sends back for downloads / browsing etc can get swamped.

Dropbox is the worst culprit for this. We went through a phase at work where our internet connection would get killed at around 8.30am every day, I could see the pings go from 20ms up to several hundred ms. I rang the ISP to ask what was going on and they told me I was running the upstream flat out and it would impact everyone (I understood the consequence, but was unaware we were flogging the upstream to death).

Everyone denied uploading anything, so I went round the office pulling out LAN cables from the backs of computers while my colleague watched a ping trace until I found the culprit. Turned out to be the person who was complaining about it the most, the MD / company owner. He would get in to work, plug his phone in to the USB port and dropbox would spring into life and start syncing gigabytes of holiday photos and videos.

I told him off :rotfl: