Net Speed Impedes Sharing?

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Are you paying big bucks for speedy downloads only to find out that what is holding you back is your lame upload speed? Don’t feel bad, most people have the same problem. Is it time for a change in the way residential internet access is handled? We think so.

The information superhighway isn't truly equal in both directions. Cable and phone
companies typically sell asymmetrical Internet services to households, reserving the bulk of the lanes for downloading movies and other files and leaving the shoulders at most for people to share, or upload, files with others.
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if you have more than one person on the network it gets to be atrocious! for example, if my friend is torrenting, and i'm trying to play cs, or wow or what have you... it doesn't work. cause the lame upload essentially REQUIRES that I invest in a gaming router or take the time to setup a dedicated computer running m0n0wall or something similar. this shouldn't be necesary!

and now for the main kicker for me... the government paid the telcos to get fiber to teh curb a few years back. by this time all major cities were supposed to have ftc... but verizon is only just starting... and the other telcos aren't even trying... *sigh* corruption sucks.
 
I've actually found that the minimal upload speed can impact gameplay even when torrents aren't going on. I pay over $150 a month to CableOne for their "business" package to my house (incredible download, I must admit) and just one person playing Halo 2 or CS:S can completely fuck up any other game, and two people playing games (which happens a lot; it's an apartment/dorm for 5 people) halts web browsing.

Doubleve' T F?
 
Totally agree, got a household with 7 computers on a home network. Three online games slow things down significant such that I often get booted from a game due to a high ping.
 
I agree with what everyone is saying but has anyone tried cfosspeed? If put on all computers you can reduce the priority of uploading programs like torrents and other things and then have your games have a very high priority, it works well with one computer and then decreases there after cauze of the router. But it helped me out significantly on 3 computers. Programs 10bucks well worth, i can upload on all 3 computers and still play games and browse the net with little to no hiccups.

I hate my 512kb upload speed i think it's bs that we have 6 meg downloads and that slow of uploads.
 
This was a real point of contention with me personally. I kept asking Roadrunner if they were going to upgrade their residential upload speeds, and I was on their premium plan sucking it up with a mere 512Kbps upload.

Using my linux router with true 7 layer QoS it wasn't a big problem, I just had to make sure that if I wanted to be able to use my network remotely, all torrents were closed.

One day out of the blue they upgraded, and I was up to 1Mbps upload. This made all the difference in the world, and now I can have multiple torrents going and loose nothing in the way of latency when utilizing my systems remotely, and no problems gaming either.

It is true that most people will always have problems using torrents and crappy upload speeds simply because bit torrent rides over TCP, and those ACK's are critical for moving the download along.

With a heavy torrent downloading at 500K/s+ with 10+ peers offering, you're looking at at least a 20K/s ACK overhead. Without QoS and hard limits on bandwidth usage per protocol/port, all your packets are being treated equal, and the UDP packets you're sending to the game server are getting shuffled right in line with the rest of the traffic.

I have overheard so many folks saying this or that ISP sucks, and complaints about speeds at certain times of the day... I have never seen it. I have helped a couple family members set up this same solution on their network, and they tell me that visitors will comment on how much faster internet is than at the guest's home... and they have the same provider. Now more than ever seems to be a time where some expertise lent to a small home network can mean all the difference in the world concerning reliability and speed of internet use on said network.
 
Oplin, using a program to limit torrent programs is great for speed, but that defeats the point of sharing. I think the argument here is that it should be closer to a 1:1 ratio, or even a 3:1 ratio download:upload. Not this 100:1 or even up to 10000:1 ratio it is with some plans.
 
jetpig said:
if you have more than one person on the network it gets to be atrocious! for example, if my friend is torrenting, and i'm trying to play cs, or wow or what have you... it doesn't work. cause the lame upload essentially REQUIRES that I invest in a gaming router or take the time to setup a dedicated computer running m0n0wall or something similar. this shouldn't be necesary!
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Given the viral nature of P2P software, anything but "the biggest" upstream pipe is going to make monowall or a decent QoS implementation a necessity. And honestly, why not be smart about tagging the data you send? After all P2P traffic just doesn't require the lowest latency...

Would I like more upstream BW? For sure. Do I think that more upstream BW is the end-all solution? Certainly not.
 
thedude42 said:
One day out of the blue they upgraded, and I was up to 1Mbps upload. This made all the difference in the world, and now I can have multiple torrents going and loose nothing in the way of latency when utilizing my systems remotely, and no problems gaming either.
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I've had both DSL and cable, and have noticed that 1Mbit upload seems to be about the sweet spot. Cable seems to be the worst offender (in my area anyway.) I think the standard is 6mbit down/376kbit upload, and like you said, the acks can eat that upload all by themselves. I don't want to pay an extra $10 a month to get their enhanced offering with 768k down, it still seems like a pittance.

About the guy bitching about fiber to the home/node - check out the recent arstechnica coverage of the fight at&t is having in chicago about it. Municipalities and cablecos are the ones holding it up, trying to call it a video service and making them subject to the same regus as the cable industry.

Meanwhile, Scandanavia and Japan/Korea enjoy thie 10 or 100mbit symmetric connections. Sure, the speed to the outside world isn't that fast, but c'mon even Europe and vdsl is getting faster and cheaper than the states.
 
I'm on a 16/3, and without paying well over $600 a month, I cannot buy more upstream! I VPN to my home system frequently, and it's incredibly frustrating. I even paid an additional $10 a month to upgrade to the 3mb from 1.5. :rolleyes:

It's not like everyone who needs extra upstream is a freaking pirate. I can download more quickly than 99% of the webservers out there will upload, so who freaking cares if you increase my downstream!
 
Despite the engineering limitations, someone needs to offer a package that allows for greater upload speeds for those that require/desire it. If that means getting no cable TV than so be it, whatever need be. I don't watch tv anymore anyways. Too many damn reality TV shows and commercials...
 
Klintor said:
Oplin, using a program to limit torrent programs is great for speed, but that defeats the point of sharing.
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Frankly, I am a pretty nice peer when you look at my statistics, since I usually seed 2x the amount I leech. That is with the QoS in place that puts P2P into the slow lane.
Klintor said:
I think the argument here is that it should be closer to a 1:1 ratio, or even a 3:1 ratio download:upload. Not this 100:1 or even up to 10000:1 ratio it is with some plans.
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I don't think anyone disagrees that the current ratios are rather useless. I could care less for 10+Mbit downstream. However, it is important to realize that CableCo and TelCo are not selling their product to you, me or most people on the [H] whom I'd consider "power users" but rather Joe Schmoe.

And Joe Schmoe doesn't understand that he needs upload. He only wants to grab his Naspter/ iTunes music, look at some pr0n and YouTube. All these activities are downstream bound. So Joe Schmoe doesn't care about 10/2, but rather about 25/.5...
 
This is bullshit.

I pay ~180/mo for three 3/800k connections. All three are used for my webservers, and all three get totally saturated on heavy days.

I can't grow my business because of the fact that I can't get any decent upload speed without looking at bonded DSL ($$$, not to mention none of the ISPs in Toronto seem to support PPPoE Multilink anyways...), T1 lines, or other expensive wireless connections.
 
drizzt81 said:
Frankly, I am a pretty nice peer when you look at my statistics, since I usually seed 2x the amount I leech. That is with the QoS in place that puts P2P into the slow lane.
I don't think anyone disagrees that the current ratios are rather useless. I could care less for 10+Mbit downstream. However, it is important to realize that CableCo and TelCo are not selling their product to you, me or most people on the [H] whom I'd consider "power users" but rather Joe Schmoe.

And Joe Schmoe doesn't understand that he needs upload. He only wants to grab his Naspter/ iTunes music, look at some pr0n and YouTube. All these activities are downstream bound. So Joe Schmoe doesn't care about 10/2, but rather about 25/.5...
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That, and the ISPs like the fact that they can charge way more than the bandwidth is worth for a business connection like T1, T3, etc that has any decent upload speed.

This is all about the benjamins.
 
Josh_B said:
That, and the ISPs like the fact that they can charge way more than the bandwidth is worth for a business connection like T1, T3, etc that has any decent upload speed.

This is all about the benjamins.
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They normally charge business more for two reasons a) upstream bandwidth b) service level agreements..
If your consumer level service goes down you are stuck with the fine print that says something like "we will try and resolve this as soon as possible", which could be days or weeks.

A small business plan will often 48 hour resolution to issues.

A corporate ADSL plan will offer an uptime ratting some times in 9s where you should never seen more than a few minutes of downtime in a year. If there is more you can sue their ass for not delivering on the contract.
 
Lazybones said:
If there is more you can sue their ass for not delivering on the contract.
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This also holds water for simple home accounts too, no?? Those are 'contracts' that home users sign when they pay for any ISPs' home service too, not just business users. I think the proper term is a Breach of Contract
 
brachy33 said:
Despite the engineering limitations, someone needs to offer a package that allows for greater upload speeds for those that require/desire it. If that means getting no cable TV than so be it, whatever need be. I don't watch tv anymore anyways. Too many damn reality TV shows and commercials...
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there are no limitation. there are companies price fixing and not spending on upgrades. i could see a govt investigation into many of these companies soon.
 
brachy33 said:
This also holds water for simple home accounts too, no?? Those are 'contracts' that home users sign when they pay for any ISPs' home service too, not just business users. I think the proper term is a Breach of Contract
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The point is that home agreements only have a vague 'in a timely manner' clause, while business agreements have hard numbers. If your home line is down for a day, you might not be able to get that funny email from your buddy, but if a Bank's connection is down for a day they could lose millions of dollars. To safeguard against that, they have an uptime agreement.

There's probably local laws and statutes regulating downtime for home lines (presumably in the cablecos municipality agreement) which you could have recourse under, but most likely all the company is obligated to do is to reduce your bill.
 
IanG said:
The point is that home agreements only have a vague 'in a timely manner' clause, while business agreements have hard numbers. If your home line is down for a day, you might not be able to get that funny email from your buddy, but if a Bank's connection is down for a day they could lose millions of dollars. To safeguard against that, they have an uptime agreement.

There's probably local laws and statutes regulating downtime for home lines (presumably in the cablecos municipality agreement) which you could have recourse under, but most likely all the company is obligated to do is to reduce your bill.
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That was exactly my point. Your agreement often doesn't agree to fix anything really, where as the business ones do. Since the ISP is bound by the agreement, they better fix things quickly.

Also in terms of consumer home and small business there is sometimes a difference in support. I literal changed my service to a Small business plan for the support alone, the difference in call centre response was huge. Basically the difference between getting a lvl 1 checklist drone and a level 2 technician. Home support start by asking you if it is plugged in, business support know what you mean by getting packet loss and goes directly to checking the logs on their equipment.

Big difference in the quality of support you are paying for.
 
Well, having service like I have that is 20:1 is just insane. I upload a lot of pictures and video for our reviews and I work on the web (duh).

For $99.99 a month, I get 10Mbps Down and 512Kbps Up.

What are you guys getting and for how much?
 
^^I'm getting 16/3, with tax I pay around $60/month. It's Comcast.
 
Oldie said:
^^I'm getting 16/3, with tax I pay around $60/month. It's Comcast.
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What is the name of your package? I'm gonna give Comcast a call!
 
Dew said:
What is the name of your package? I'm gonna give Comcast a call!
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I'm on a 6Mbps/768 plan right now for $63/month (No TV). They recently rolled out power boost, so occasionally I see 20+Mbps, but I would rather have an always 16/3 connection.
 
Steve said:
Well, having service like I have that is 20:1 is just insane. I upload a lot of pictures and video for our reviews and I work on the web (duh).

For $99.99 a month, I get 10Mbps Down and 512Kbps Up.

What are you guys getting and for how much?
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im on 4000/384ish, but now with that speedbost crap I regulary get 15,000/384. Its costing me $30.00 per month, but after 6 months (which is coming up in 2 months) of initially signing on, it jumps up to about 50 a month, which isnt even worth it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS

DOCSIS Downstream Upstream
1.0 38 Mbps 10 Mbps
2.0 40 Mbps 30 Mbps
3.0 300 Mbps 120 Mbps

Im not sure how many users are on each loop, but I cant imagine it being more than 20. I assume DOCSIS 1.0 is used in the USA most commonly... so im using 0.384k out of 10 possible mbps :mad:.

Somewhere in wiki, an article was talking about gigabit internet being offered in china. I guess im not the only one, who feels like the USA is behind everyone for internet. Australia is even worse.
 
Steve said:
Well, having service like I have that is 20:1 is just insane. I upload a lot of pictures and video for our reviews and I work on the web (duh).

For $99.99 a month, I get 10Mbps Down and 512Kbps Up.

What are you guys getting and for how much?
Click to expand...

Since you asked.. All prices are in Canadian dollars, here are a list of packages from my cable provider Shaw (http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/).

I am on a business package for $59.95 I get the following
10mbit down
1mbit up
110 GB/month limit (you have to double this before they call you and tell you to download less)

Starting this month they offer the following for $99.00/mo (consumer not a business plan)
25 mbit down
1mbit up
150GB/moth limit

I run a modified linksys WRT54GS router with layer 7 QOS enabled. I am able to peg the connection at near full rated 10mbit speeds on some bit torrents, particularly the hosted Zudeo torrents as they have very highspeed seeds. I have no intention of upgrading to the 25mbit plan as it is hard enough to max out my 10mbit connection because most sources for downloading don't have the upload bandwidth. Also to top it off the WAN interface on my WRT54GS maxes out at 10mbit speeds when routing anyway.. I would need to purchase a much more expensive router.
 
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