Interesting... - Internet speeds

[Jamez]

OK, for the last 6 months I've been using the internet via an NTL 600k broadband internet connection.

Yes, the file transfer speeds of files from Kazaa are approx 80-90kbps (1MB of data takes around 12 seconds to download to my computer). This is very fab for people like me who are incredibly impatient and cherish their high-speed internet connections.

However, browsing the web on relatively fast-loading websites like TV Forum, Metropol, BBC Homepage etc. are roughly the SAME as a 56k modem which I'm currently using at the moment (due to me coming back to the nineteenth century twilight zone of rural Pembrokeshire for the summer months - I tells ya, it's doing my head in already and I've only been back since Tuesday!).

OK, back to the page-loading comparisons to Dial-Up and BB. Why do they load at the same speed on my computer? I knew it wasn't as quick as it was meant to be on BB, so I'm wondering if my CPU speed has anything much to do with it.

I'm running a 1.7Ghz Packard Bell WXP computer, which is clogged up with zillions of MB of various multimedia, such as practically every RealMedia file from TV Home, Ark, Room. Plus the loads and loads of MP3's, Videos etc. I've gathered since May 2003.

I've De-fragged my computer a couple of times since last May and uninstalled loads and loads of software I never use. The last time I de-fragged was around Christmas time. I cleared out the 2GB of data lurking in My Temp Internet Files a week ago and it took....wait for it....a massive 28 minutes to delete! Surely this cannot be right!

I know this should be in the computer forum, but I never look in there and will probably forget that I posted this...you know what I'm like!

Anyway, any comments on my above dilemas regarding my computer would be greatly apprieciated.

[Dr Lobster*]

OK, back to the page-loading comparisons to Dial-Up and BB. Why do they load at the same speed on my computer? I knew it wasn't as quick as it was meant to be on BB, so I'm wondering if my CPU speed has anything much to do with it.

I would imagine it would be because most webpages have been optimised for viewing on a 56k connection (and the fairly efficient caching of internet explorer). Certainly on my connection at work, which is a 2mb leased line, most websites display the same at work than they do at home (at least after one visit where most of the large-ist content is cached.

[Chris]

However, browsing the web on relatively fast-loading websites like TV Forum, Metropol, BBC Homepage etc. are roughly the SAME as a 56k modem which I'm currently using at the moment (due to me coming back to the nineteenth century twilight zone of rural Pembrokeshire for the summer months - I tells ya, it's doing my head in already and I've only been back since Tuesday!).

Welcome James to ntl's poxy proxy system.

Basically, ntl unlike most other ISP's use a proxy server, which in English is a computer that sits between you and the internet and it fetches pages on your behalf, stores them on its hard drive and then serves them to you. In theory it is supposed to speed up web browsing and cut down on external bandwidth costs, by serving content to the local network (e.g. user 1 requests bbc.co.uk, proxy requests files from bbc.co.uk webpage, files go onto proxy's hard drive, proxy serves them to you. User 2 requests bbc.co.uk and data is transferred from the proxy to the computer requesting it rather than directly from the site in question and so on).

ntl's proxies have a 'reputation' for being unreliable. That was the primary reason why I left ntl because they made browsing such a pain in the backside because it was so unreliable and slow. When the proxy isn't working properly or broken all web browsing appears to be 'broken' or slow.

ntl do not seem to display any interest in improving their systems (their email has been bust for well over a year!) so the long term solution would be to leave ntl and go for an alternative ADSL provider that does not force proxies upon you.

In the short term, the solution is to manually change your proxy to another one selected from this ( http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h. ... cache.html ) page. However it will probably not last for long and you may need to change it again, so keep that page handy.

I know from personal experience that ntl's proxy system is totally useless - to get to the payments page by clicking the pay now button on ebay took 5 changes of proxy for it to just get to the 1st page. I came back next day and found that it wasn't working again so I ended up changing proxy yet again. It started driving me up the wall after doing it about 10 times!!

[cwathen]

As the doctor said, IE, along with virtually every other web browser, has it's own internal cache.

When you go to a web page, it downloads and stores some (occasionally, all) of the files that that web page uses. If you go back to that site, the cache will flag up that it allready has the files for it, and it will then compare the file headers of the cached file with that of the remote file on the internet, and if they are the same (i.e. the file hasn't been updated), it will just pull it straight out of the cache rather than download it again.

Thus, for websites that you go to a lot, they will appear to load in the same time regardless of your connection speed, because only a small amount of bandwidth is being used.

In all likelihood, if you deleted the cache and then downloaded the page again, you would notice a significant difference in the speed of the two connections.

That said, your own connection can be as fast as you like but it will only work as fast as the connection on the other end; if someone is serving a website over a 56k modem, then obviously you can't access that site any faster than that modem can work.

The final big thing it could be is the issue of contention. Although you may have signed up to a 600K connection, if you read the fine print, you will probably find that it has a 'contention ratio'. Most domestic broadband connections have a contention ratio of 50:1. This in essence means that the same 600K connection could be shared by 50 people, and if all 50 people are trying to heavily tax the connection at the same time, your 600K connection won't operate any faster than 12K!

Fortunately, it is rare for the the contention quota being filled out AND all of those people being signed on at the same time AND all of them heavily using the connection at the same time which is required in order to cause such a drastic effect on your connection speed, but on a lass drastic scale it does regularly happen - you may not always have your full connection speed available. The same kind of thing happens at the other end - a web server might well have a 512K connection (in reality it will usually have one much faster) but it has to divide that over all the people trying to connect to it.