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I bought a sufferfest download yesterday evening, at about 8:30.
It's still downloading!!! Aaaaarrrgghhh!!!
I've connected my laptop directly to my router (normally wifi), had it on all night and even gone out and bought a new ethernet cable so the rest of the family can use the wifi. I've left it to do it's thing - doing this post on my phone.
Download speeds have generally ranged between 20 and 50 kbps, although for one brief glorious minute it was at 500. Did do a speed test which said max speed was 1.5k, I only got a third of that for one minute!
So any top tips please.
turn off any other running services, keep it plugged in. Do something else.
It's been plugged in all the time. I have had a good night's sleep, a lie-in, read the paper, taken the dogs for a big walk, watched the man u city game, watched some French rugby, and done some light gardening.
How do I check what services might be running?
Does it matter which browser I'm using? FireFox is doing the job, would Chrome have been any quicker?
Put the laptop on the floor. The electrons will go down the wire faster if the laptop is lower than the router.
Really, the bottleneck is going to be outside your control here I think. Nothing you do with the laptop will make much difference short of wiring it in rather than wireless.
What is your normal broadband speed ?
What amount of traffic is shown on your router at the moment ?
Try disabling the Wi Fis from your router ( ignore the wailing and nashing of teeth from your children ) does the download speed increase ?
Use a 3rd party download helper software like DAP, it's free.
I saw DAP on my google quest for answers, wasn't sure it wasn't just snake oil, but it works for you bikebuouy?
Cranberry, dunno the answers to your first 2 questions... no significant difference with wifi connected or not, though it has been disabled most of the time. I think I'm on "up to 2gb"with virgin.
Nearly 24 hours and 1.2 gb of 1.6 downloaded, for 1hr of video. 🙁
If you can pause the download, do so, go to speedtest.net and run said test. Report back your results.
Up to 2 Mbit or up to 256K bytes/second isn't very fast though - and you might well in practice be getting considerably less depending on how things are with Virgin/how far you are from an exchange/the current wind direction/etc.
Have you gone over your download quota for the month? Most ISPs throttle your maximum download speed once you've gone over a certain limit.
Either throttled or there is a bottleneck where it is being sent from, if everything else is going fine, web browsing etc. then the problem is probably elsewhere and totally out of your control would be my guess. you tried downloading anything else, like starting a Youtube video? You won't really lose anything if it is going so slowly already but may show if your connection is working as normal or not...
I think I'm on "up to 2gb"with virgin.
Ah. There's your problem, right there.
Virgin, like other ISPs, 'throttle' downloads so that the ADSL lines don't get all clogged up. Depending on where you live, but in areas like where I live, there are basically too many people on each ADSL thingy at the exchange, which means slower speeds for everyone. Throttling limits the individual download speeds to each household, especially at 'peak' times. Look at it's progress at 3am or so, and you'll probbly find it's much quicker. Does seem particularly slow though.
What area are you in? There are 'braawdband poverty hotspots', where BB speeds are woeful.
The problem stems from BT having a monopoly over the control of the physical exchange equipment, and not investing enough in more hardware/faster technology because they are moneygrabbing shysters put yopu on hold for 45 mins take months to sort out any problems oh don't get me started on BT.....
Sorry, That probbly don't make much sense, does it? I got a bit carried away.... 😳
Downloaded DAP and started all over again! Much better speeds especially now most folk are in bed, currently 260 -300kbps, still some way off 2gb though. I'm not over my limit for the month as I don't have one, it's unlimited with virgin and I only download a couple of albums' worth of music each month on average anyway. Is Huddersfield a broadband poor area? According to speed tests they reckon I can get 50gb on this network if I were willing to pay for it! This is my first time downloading video, didn't realise it could be such an arse, takes me back to dial-up days!
Cheers for all the advice, off to bed now, about 40 minutes left till it's finished but I'm too tired to wait up.
260 -300kbps
That's what you shouls see on a 2 Meg connection, the cheeky wotsits call 2 Mbit connection 2 Meg, hence why my 10 'Meg' connection gives me 1 Megabyte per second download speed.
"oh don't get me started on BT....."
I will have you beat hands down. They were throttling me down to half a meg on an eight meg connection for years. I spent the usual wasted time trying to get some help from them, and ended up taking it to OTELO. They were no help at all. After countless hours on the phone to BT, three letters to their head office, OTELO wanted me to give them 'one more chance' to improve my service with another letter.
Ultimately, they seem to have made at least minor upgrades at our local exchange, and now I get 1.5 mb, which I can live with.
Of course... I am partly to blame for not wanting to risk the troubles associated with changing provider. I am also concerned that BT can still affect my connection speed on their hardware no matter who I am paying for the service.
You ever want to take bloody revenge on the scum... I am coming along!
Don't get confused by Megabits and Megabytes...
If my maths is right (and it seldom is!) a 2 Megabit connection, should have a download speed of approximately 250 Kilobytes per second.
A 10 Megabit connection will give you a download speed of approximately 1.2 Megabytes per second.
headfirst,
If I have missed it above (I honestly did look 🙂 ) then I apologise.
How large a download is it?
Just to give an idea how long in my experience I would expect it to take.
I have downloaded large file for games in the past, and it's pretty well accepted that if you have a slow connection, it's worth cancelling and trying again and it may be a lot better.
I am sure what you have gone through is 100% at their end. I honestly think even using wireless would not have been the bottleneck here.
Were you downloading something that as lot of other people would have been at the same time?
Here is a sneaky tip for you. Let others in the household connect, but block out facebook, youtube and others like it on your router. Then just look stupid and say 'I know... I can't get on it either' when they complain! 😉
headfirst,
If I have missed it above (I honestly did look 🙂 ) then I apologise.
How large a download is it?
Just to give an idea how long in my experience I would expect it to take.
I have downloaded large file for games in the past, and it's pretty well accepted that if you have a slow connection, it's worth cancelling and trying again and it may be a lot better.
I am sure what you have gone through is 100% at their end. I honestly think even using wireless would not have been the bottleneck here.
Were you downloading something that as lot of other people would have been at the same time?
Here is a sneaky tip for you. Let others in the household connect, but block out f*cebook, youtube and others like it on your router. Then just look stupid and say 'I know... I can't get on it either' when they complain! 😉
What he said. ^
One [b]B[/b]yte = 8 [b]b[/b]its. The thing to look for is the size of the 'B'.
1 M[b]B[/b] = One Mega[b]Byte[/b]. = 8M[b]b[/b] Eight Mega[b]bits[/b]
All companies use Mega[b]bits[/b] per second as their unit of speed.
8M[b]b[/b]ps = 1 M[b]B[/b]ps.
Your computer wil probably display things in terms of Mega[b]Bytes[/b] though. Dunno why but that's how it seems to be.
So, if you're seeing speeds of 200K[b]B[/b]ps, thattul mean you're getting 1.6M[b]b[/b]ps.
Obviously, more sounds better. Which is why the actual speeds indicated by your router/speed monitor/speedtest seem slower
Hope that clears things up a bit.
You ever want to take bloody revenge on the scum... I am coming along!
They truly are scum. Utter, utter scum. Worst company I have ever dealt with in my entire life.
DAP works for me, the free one that is, I d/l music and stream a lot and I thinks it's a good piece of kit.
That's like saying "oh it normally only takes 30 minutes to get to my house in Cardiff, and yet I've already been driving for 5 hours from Scotland and I'm still not there, I'm stuck on the M42 at 5.30pm, that never happens on the M4 at 2am!"
Your download is made up of millions of tiny packets of data, all negotiating something fairly similar to the UK's road and street network, except it covers the whole world. There could be any kind of bottleneck or problem anywhere, you've really got no control over it, as above.
The bit between your laptop and your router is far quicker than the bit between your house and the internet, even with a poor wifi signal. If other downloads or webpages are working fine then you don't need to mess about with wires.
8Mbps = 1 MBps
Snot quite as simple as that. There's a lot of extra information being transmitted besides your actual download, and that depends on a whole host of factors. To download a 10MB file in an hour could take many more than 80Mbits actually being sent. There are loads of variables, so it's actually much fairer to quote megabits not megabytes. Plus stuff like video streaming and online gaming work completely differently to surfing and downloading files.
Or, to put it more simply, it could be their end that's buggered.
Right thanks for all of that, so actually with DAP I wasn't a million miles away from the sort of speed 'promised' by Virgin.
This evening there may be a new thread about DVD formats and burning software...