That's an understatement at the end Ronni. Reading through your list
of variables gives me the shivers. I spent a 30 minutes call with a
young (very helpful) bloke at Westnet yesterday when I could not make
my HUAWEI usb modem do anything beyond snails and dropout . The end
of that exchange as "Its Optus" and we have no control was the
verdict. At least I can send message to iphones with it!
Bill
On 20/06/2011, at 3:47 PM, Ronda Brown wrote:
On 20/06/2011, at 3:30 PM, Michael Hawkins wrote:
In the space of a few minutes speeds ranged from 3.4 mb/s download
to 15.48 (wireless), and 9.18 to 16.37 (ethernet, same modem).
Uploads were all in vicinity of 0.83 to 0.85.
ADSL2+, Westnet, 77 St Georges Terrace
Perth.
Hi Michael,
Nothing unusual about speed changes, because there may be a great
many links in the chain between your Mac and the server it’s talking
to, and any one of them could be the bottleneck.
"For example:
• Your Mac itself could have network configuration problems.
• Your browser, or a plug-in, might be at fault
• A particular process (such as an online backup program)
could be monopolising your Internet bandwidth.
• You could have a bad Ethernet cable. (Seriously!)
• The Wi-Fi connection between your Mac and your AirPort base
station or other wireless router might be too slow.
• The broadband link to your ISP could be inherently slow, or the
ISP could be experiencing temporary congestion.
• The DNS servers that map domain names to IP addresses could be
responding slowly, adding delays to each request you make.
• The server on the other end—or any of the intervening routers,
switches, hubs, gateways, and other equipment—might be too slow.
When I Say “Slow...”
Networking geeks are often quick to reprimand anyone who dares to
use words like “slow,” “fast,” or “speed” when referring to a
network, because signal speed per se—the movement of electrons
through copper wire or photons through optical fiber—isn’t what most
people are talking about. So what are we talking about?
On the one hand, you have bandwidth, which is itself a metaphorical
usage, but now generally refers to the capacity, or maximum possible
data transfer rate, of a network segment as expressed in (tera-/
giga-/mega-/kilo-) bits per second. For example, your DSL connection
may have a bandwidth of 8 Mbps (megabits per second), which means
that, in theory, you could download a 1 MB file
(1 megabyte = 8 megabits) in 1 second.
However, a more important concept is throughput, which you can think
of as the real-world data transfer rate (amount of data received per
unit of time)—invariably a good bit lower than the theoretical
bandwidth. Your so-called 8 Mbps connection may have throughput of
only, say, 6 Mbps—and that can vary from moment to moment."
Networking is a very interesting challenging project ;-)
Cheers,
Ronni
17" MacBook Pro 2.3GHz Quad-Core i7 “Thunderbolt"
2.3GHz / 8GB / 750GB @ 7200rpm HD
OS X 10.6.7 Snow Leopard
Windows 7 Ultimate (under sufferance)
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