To experience 10 megabit broadband...

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xy16644

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Hello All!

I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the "broadband" experience in SA. I had a 192k 3GB capped account and it was JUST enough to last me through the month. Occassionally I would save up my cap and download a 350-400MB file but this could take up to a day. I paid R650pm for this privledge.

Now I am in the UK (have been here 2 months) and the first thing I did was apply for a 10 mega bits per second cable connection from Telewest for £35pm UNCAPPED.

Let me just say that this is how broadband is MEANT TO BE!!! If I download from Apple (for video trailers) or Microsoft I usually get 1250k/sec!!! In my first month alone I downloaded almost 300GB of stuff. To download this much on 192k 3GB per month ADSL would take about 8 or 9 years.

This to me is a dream come true and I can't help but boast about it! If I HAD to complain its that I can only upload at 384k but I hardly ever upload anything so this doesn't worry me at all.

I do everything with this connection: streaming radio, video, music, P2P/Bit Torrent, photos etc etc.

From a very happy internet user..
 
Don't worry xy, soon you'll be taking it for granted, trust me.
 
I agree...

I'm already drooling over the 24MB ADSL options but it looks like I am too far away from the exchange to even get 16MB.

I wanted to post a pic taken of downlaod accelerator but couldn't figure out how to! :confused:
 
push the print screen button, then open paint and ctrl-v/paste it and save as jpg/png then post on uhm.. some image hosting site
 
I used to have pictures of my torrent client with like 10 downloads going with a total combined speed of like 1.4MB/s

*sigh*
 
Pulling 300-400GB on a 10Mb+ line is considered normal in the rest of the world...that's why they have uncapped. This country is gonna have to get it's act together before 2010..they can't keep their fingers in their a$$es forever.
 
1024kB/s thats like dream spead already and at 24Mb/s it would be max 3000KB/s :eek:
wow.. 1MB/s... just wow
 
Hee hee

Awesome hey?! On a really good day I get 1250k/sec!!

Yeah, 24MB must be un bloody believable! Getting fussy...
 
Also xp vista 3.5 gig will be done in 1hr or in SA terms you will be capped in under a 1 hr :eek: if some silly malware downloads the internet.
 
And here we are in the dark ages, still having to watch our daily usage to avoid getting hard capped. :mad:

Thanks for making our day xy16644 and giving us a glimpse of what Broadband may be like in the year 2020 in South Africa. :(
 
1MB/sec in SA...

I work in IT and when I was in SA, we hosted our web servers on a major ISPs backbone and I saw 1MB/sec downloads but it was rare. In fact, the bandwidth got so bad when I left there that a Windows Update took about a day to complete! Scary...

At the office where I work now in the UK they have dual 45Mbps (for redundancy) links to the internet. There I can see 2MB/sec+ downloads! The cherry on the top is that they are gonna upgrade it to 2Gbps shortly and the cost of this per month? £1500...

People in the UK that I work with must wonder why my mouth is always hanging wide open when they tell me these things!
 
I'm on a 10mb uncapped service, same ISP........ ntl/telewest and I must admit that since being moved from a 75gb capped service to uncapped I have definately noticed some traffic shaping when downloading, so that uncapped theory is not that true. Have you watched the interview by the bbc programme "click" recently.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/4905660.stm

what was discussed has started to happen.
 
Thanks

Had a read through that link, interesting. I have only had this ervice for about 6 weeks now so I'm not sure what their service was like.

What I can say is that I can't complain being able to download 10 huge files simultaneously with P2P and "only" be getting 300k/sec in total. So what if some files take 3 days to download (like a full 8.5GB DVD) or they get downloaded overnight? Doesn't worry me. The fastest P2P download I have ever seen in my P2P client has been about 200k/sec but that is rare. Generally I see speeds of 50-100k/sec PER DOWNLOAD. Usually my laptop grinds to a halt if I try to add anymore downloads. Also my upload speed is only 384k so while seeding things can slow down so I throttle the upload speed in the P2P app to 20k/sec. In ZA it took me 12 hours to download one episode of Prison break...the file size? 350MB! In the same time here I can get about 4GB!

I find I only get the full 10 megabits if downloading from an Akamai site, Microsoft or Apple. Then the download speeds scream. I downloaded the Vista ISO (3.4GB) in one hour...
 
Drool!

xy16644 said:
I downloaded the Vista ISO (3.4GB) in one hour...
Click to expand...

Sniff, not fair. Even sitting at the office I restarted the downloads over a period of a week. Only on the long weekend was I able to download both the 32-bit and 64-bit ISO's without interruption and corruption.

Oh well, at least I finally got it down :-D (even if it took many, many, many hours!)
 
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