Speed confusion

[venterap]

Ok, I feel slightly silly in asking this, but Iḿ working my way through wodges of ISP offerings with speed this and contention ration that, when a thought suddenly stopped dead in its tracks and has been banging insistently on the backdoor to get in.

Here goes: When we see XYZ offers 128kbps (or 128kb), it generally means that he says he can give me max 128 kilo BITS per second, which translates to 16 kilo BYTES per second, right? With a contention ration of (say) 1:4, that gives me a minimun of 32kbps/4kBps.

My current ISDN line is capable of 64kbs (or 128 if I double up). In fact I'm lucky to get 7.5kBps sometimes, people tell me. I can install a DigiNet 64kbps line for un***ly amounts of money. And it also has huge contention ratios. I can also get a business VSAT with 16kbps up & 64kbps down, also with big contention ratios.

Why then, all other things being equal, is the DigiNet line and the VSAT considered adequate for business, if they are in fact slower than my ISDN line. The DigiNet line is considered very fast. Heck, the VSAT is slower than a friggin modem!

Apart from a few marbles, what am I missing here?

Dries

 

[DaveBuchanan1337]

hokay - totally agree with the un***ly bandwidth prices you described...

contention ratios, you must remember, are not static. they are dynamic relative to the total bandwidth available / (connection speed) * users. iBurst contention ratios are purported to be quite high - yet I regularly achieve 0.5mbit on a single threaded international download.

Draw your own conclusions, don't be suckered into the marketing propaganda of the corporation guys upstairs!

 

[DaveBuchanan1337]

holy goodness, my blasphemy was converted into asterixes! what censorship!

a correction to my post - unG0Dly (where zero means 'o') bandwidth prices...

 

[slimothy]

Ok, I feel slightly silly in asking this, but Iḿ working my way through wodges of ISP offerings with speed this and contention ration that, when a thought suddenly stopped dead in its tracks and has been banging insistently on the backdoor to get in.

Here goes: When we see XYZ offers 128kbps (or 128kb), it generally means that he says he can give me max 128 kilo BITS per second, which translates to 16 kilo BYTES per second, right? With a contention ration of (say) 1:4, that gives me a minimun of 32kbps/4kBps.

My current ISDN line is capable of 64kbs (or 128 if I double up). In fact I'm lucky to get 7.5kBps sometimes, people tell me. I can install a DigiNet 64kbps line for un***ly amounts of money. And it also has huge contention ratios. I can also get a business VSAT with 16kbps up & 64kbps down, also with big contention ratios.

Why then, all other things being equal, is the DigiNet line and the VSAT considered adequate for business, if they are in fact slower than my ISDN line. The DigiNet line is considered very fast. Heck, the VSAT is slower than a friggin modem!

Apart from a few marbles, what am I missing here?

Dries

whats this gotta do with iburst?

 

[dbnnet]

I can install a DigiNet 64kbps line for un***ly amounts of money. And it also has huge contention ratios....
.....if they are in fact slower than my ISDN line.

You are missing one important point: There are ISP's... and then there are ISP's.
If you have a huge contention ratio on your corporate DigiNet line... do yourself a favour and change ISP's.
(You are probably being taken for a ride)
1st tier ISP's like IS will even provide a 1:1 solution if you wish.....and can afford it.

 

[venterap]

holy goodness, my blasphemy was converted into asterixes! what censorship!

a correction to my post - unG0Dly (where zero means 'o') bandwidth prices...

Yes, and I see all my ratios have been changed to rations. Anybody for dogbiscuits? Wait... is anybody here actually old enough to KNOW what dogbiscuits are?

 

[dbnnet]

Some of us are still trying to recover from them

 

[MaD]

Diginet has guaranteed bandwidth, which is normally but a fraction of full speed, say 64k line will have guaranteed 16k, satellite for the most part as well.. the contention ratio's for satellite are from 5:1 upwards (VSTAR from Sentech) but you can rest assured that they are normally pretty much full speed. We had a 32k (not joking) diginet line at an office a few years ago and I always got 3.5-4KB/s.. downloading Mandrake took a few days, but it did happen eventually..

At the end of the day the higher price does bring better speed but the cost is normally prohibitive for the most part unless you are at a cash-flush company. The main advantage of course is the 24/7 connectivity and the lack of a cap.

 

[Sytze]

For some they were the last thing you give to your dog if you had some, let alone give it to your buddy.

Who else here is living off the Wonderboom tower. Or should I call it a wonder tower. Or maybe if i'm so lucky: Who's on the Wonderboom tower and tcp/IQ Line Speed Meter. Here's mine.

I'm a little confused about the varying speeds.

 

[slimothy]

tcp/IQ reads international speeds on a single thread so expect around a quarter of what you can get with multithread

the best way to test your capacity especially with iburst is to max your connection out, with multithread downloads and even webpages, just request so much data that it can't all fit in your 1mbit pipe at once, then use a download monitor like DUmeter and netlimiter and that should give you a rough idea. Or watch the iBurst terminal.

 

[Crash]

BTW. Business will go for diginet and Vsat for the Static IP.

 

[nocilah]

I work at web development firm (the best one ) and we utilise three connections.

Sentech 512Kb
Diginet line 128Kb Local and 64Kb International
ADSL 512k

ADSL out performs all of the above in most cases. Diginet is a robust line which seldom has probelms but DOES have speed issues on the INternational Front and Sentech is just daylight robbery.

Nothing to do with iBurst... but it is as Crash says.... we wouldnt even use Diginet if we didnt need a static IP.

 

[MaD]

vowthorn you can get ADSL with the IS uncapped option and it has 5 static IP's

 

[LandyMan]

We're going this route

vowthorn you can get ADSL with the IS uncapped option and it has 5 static IP's

We are canning our Diginet line (also 128 local, 64k intl.) due to speed problems internationally (my servers are in the UK, so it is a bit of a problem). The reason for the speed problems is a looonngg story (and fight), which is not for this thread/forum.

If we had iBurst reception, I would definitely use that, but we are moving to 2XADSL via IS (uncapped, 10 IP's), and it is still ALOT cheaper than diginet!

 

[jmn]

Who else here is living off the Wonderboom tower. Or should I call it a wonder tower. Or maybe if i'm so lucky: Who's on the Wonderboom tower and tcp/IQ Line Speed Meter. Here's mine.

Here's mine of Wonderboom tower for today, only registered today. Speed test on WinXP, UT-D on Fedora box. Local DNS on Fedora first, thus slow...

 

[venterap]

whats this gotta do with iburst?

Sorry to upset you. It is sort of a general question, I suppose. Nothing specific to iBurst. But you are all such nice, clever guys, I thought I'd ask here.

BTW, everybody, thanks for the answers.

Dries