20 meg ADSL - ISP implications?

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sybawoods

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I'm in the process of having my line upgraded to 20meg ADSL (*not* VDSL), thanks to TelkomZA. Due to distance from the exchange I'll likely get closer to 15meg, but I'm going for it.

I currently have a 10meg uncapped account with MWEB. Do I need to get this upgraded to take advantage of the 20meg line? If yes, what do I ask for? Or does it automatically burst to the max available speed? I've searched the posts of those whose lines got upgraded to 20 meg ADSL, but don't see any reference to ISP implications. People only seem to mention the extra R100 to Telkom...
 
If you're not downloading 100's of gigabytes/month, then why not go for capped accounts where you can pretty much all the time get full line speed.

When you have a 10Mbps uncapped account, it may spike for very short moments above 10Mbps and then level out again at 10Mbps - or at least that is how the typical uncapped account's limiting would work if you have a faster ADSL line.
 
Actually, I do have an unused Afrihost capped account which I acquired just to test latency vs Mweb. I didn't notice any difference so was about to close it. If I understand you correctly capped accounts are not rate-limited? i.e. I will always get the full speed of my line till my data is used up? If that's the case, I'll stick with Afrihost capped.

Pada said:
If you're not downloading 100's of gigabytes/month, then why not go for capped accounts where you can pretty much all the time get full line speed.

When you have a 10Mbps uncapped account, it may spike for very short moments above 10Mbps and then level out again at 10Mbps - or at least that is how the typical uncapped account's limiting would work if you have a faster ADSL line.
Click to expand...
 
sybawoods said:
Actually, I do have an unused Afrihost capped account which I acquired just to test latency vs Mweb. I didn't notice any difference so was about to close it. If I understand you correctly capped accounts are not rate-limited? i.e. I will always get the full speed of my line till my data is used up? If that's the case, I'll stick with Afrihost capped.
Click to expand...

For most ISPs. I believe some ISPs throttle even their capped accounts. I think I read earlier this week that MWEB or WebAfrica throttle capped accounts to 6mbps. Can't find the relevant thread now.

Regarding uncapped accounts, if you purchase a 4mbps uncapped account, that is what you will get, even if your line speed is higher. However, 4mbps = 1024kbps x 4 = 4096kbps = 512KB/s. So 512KB/s is the theoretical maximum download speed you'll get on a 4mbps line. Note the difference between b (bits) and B (bytes). In practice your maximum will be around 430KB/s, due to about 15% IP and transmission overheads. Now if you line speed is above 4mbps, say 6mbps, you should be able to achieve the full 512KB/s, theoretical maximum on a 4mbps account, because the IP overheads do not count in the throttling limits. So it does help somewhat.
 
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