Its been a full week of my upgrade to the 50mbit and I thought I would write a post just updating people on how it is going and some lessons learnt. The important thing to note I suppose is that jumping around the speedtest sites and getting annoyed when it does not do what it says on the tin only serves to annoy you when in reality it could be the site your testing from that does not have enough bandwidth.
Do you need 50mbit?
The short answer is that unless you download every Movie, MP3 or game – then you can pretty much do everything with the speed before, in my case been 20mbit. Upload is only useful to people who stream, upload files to FTP sites or push YouTube video’s – of course they also help the Torrents if that is your kind of thing.
Does the connection live up to the hype?
For the first few days, it hit 50mbit and 1.5mbit no matter what time of day and I could grab files from various sources faster then I could find things to download. Once the novelty wore off with me either speed testing, downloading files or uploading to my website – normal service resumed to be honest and I would not know the difference between my previous connection and this new faster one. I still had web sites that buffered in fact – so not the speed I need but better streaming sites. A few days ago – my speed started to vary a lot and it was impossible to get above 768K uploading – what gives?
QoS (Quality of Service)
One of the options on the router was QoS – now this little function will make sure that one application will not consume. Th e best example is a torrent will not affect a Skype call – the router will slow down the torrent to make sure it has enough to make skype work. I was not aware though that this “tick in the box” would make speed testing or normal downloading swing from one extreme to another.
I called Tech Support and he said he had tweaked my modem and give it a couple of hours and all shall be well again. Three hours passed and still the same – but then I remembered about this QoS thing - could it be that it was restricting my connection and keeping some bandwidth for spare?
I removed the setting – did various speed tests and bingo – full speed once again. My understanding is wrong then of this function and it is easier for me to restrict a torrent say to 1/4 of my connection and manage it myself – at least I would have all the speed at hand instead of been restricted – lesson learned.
