Can anyone explain to me...

[Fulton17]

I am not very clued up on technical issues etc, so would value some help trying to understand my ISDN better.

For me a priority is to be able to listen to streaming internet radio, and secondly to be able to download files via Bearshare. I have a 64K ISDN line.

Generally I have been able to listen to internet radio all weekend between 32KBPS and 44 KBPS which is fine for me. If I leave the radio on all weekend and browse the net a bit I would avergae 900 megs to 1 gig download for the weekend.

Over the last few weekends I have been battling to listen to internet radio (sometimes at 11KBPS which is worse the my 56K dial up days). This weekend I gave up on the radio and spent most of the time on bearshare and a little browsing, yet my downloads was in the region of 1.35gigs!!

Here is where I battle - surely if I could have downloaded so mcuh, I should not have had problems with internet radio? I tried about 4 different stations and battled with all of them. If there had been three good and one bad, I could say that the problem was on the side of the provider, but with all of them been so slow, I do not know what is going on.

If this continues I will need to try another ISP.

Another question - I gather that with ADSL some applications can be slowed down and controlled. Could this be happening here? From what I have been able to pick up, ISDN is not "Controlled" like ADSL.

Any thoughts and help would be appreciated as I know there are many members who are very clued up on these issues. I also know that Helkom and sometimes my ISP might not give me all the facts.

Thanks a lot

 

[Crash]

Latency and Packet loss affect streaming audio quite a lot.

What you might find is SAIX was having packet loss or high latency on the international links. This will cause the audio to jerk and pieces of the stream to get lost. Regardless of how much bandwidth you have, packet loss and high latency will still affect it.
Try it again too see if you get the same issue.

To check is you are getting packet loss, trying pinging www.google.com, or even the streaming radio server is you can.

Who is you ISP out of interest?
I've heard that Mweb shape their Dailups and ISDN.

 

[Fulton17]

Crash, my ISP is MJVN. They buy bandwith from IS and SIAX, so I can choose either. I normally use IS as I find they do not drop my connection.

I do not understand this pinging business, packet losses etc - sorry not very technically minded!!

 

[Crash]

Fulton17, no problem dude.
I'll give you a simple example of packet loss if you are interested.

Imagine, you pack 10 boxes into your car in Johannesburg and need to deliver them in Durban. Now on the way to Durban, one of the boxes falls out of the car and gets left on the highway. When the car gets to Durban, it's obviously missing one box.
The guy in Durban will have to do his best with the 9 boxes he got.

Packet loss is just a piece of the data getting lost on the way. Same as if you lost signal on your Cellphone while on a call. You will miss a bit of the conversation.


Ping or latency is just the time it takes for one of the packets mentioned above to go from you to the destination server or from the server to you.

 

[Fulton17]

Thanks, Crash - I can understand that.

In terms of testing for that, what must I do and how do I "read" the results? Do I do a tracert?

Thanks again

 

[useless]

This weekend I gave up on the radio and spent most of the time on bearshare and a little browsing, yet my downloads was in the region of 1.35gigs!!

On a side note, you might have some trojan or adware app which is taking up your bandwidth, thus limiting your traffic in the radio and bearshare.

Seeing that your download speeds got reduced and radio quality dropped, but still seeing a lot of data downloaded could mean you got some malware in your PC making use of your ISDN connection.

Just my 2 cents...

 

[Crash]

The easiest way to test your latency and packet throughput is like this.

Start -> run
type "cmd" and hit enter
Next type ping www.google.com

I use google.com to test my international. If you know the name or IP of say the Streaming Audio server put that in.

You'll see at the bottom:
Packet Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% Packet loss)

Obviously if the Lost = >0 then there something wrong somewhere (Telkom, ISP whatever).

To check your Latency:
Minimum = 400ms, Maximum = 500, Average = 450ms

On an ISDN you should get about 400 - 500ms international. It can spike to say 800.
If you get higher, it'll affect the streaming audio and so on.

 

[Fulton17]

Thanks Crash.

Will do that and especially over the weekend when connected for long periods.

I do run adaware programme and virus programme quite often and normally do pick up some adware issues, so thanks for that help useless