Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

Since most Thoughts Media readers are using high-speed Internet, I decided this article would benefit everyone, so it's one of our rare across-the-network pieces of content. I hope you find it useful!

Figure 1: What is this, 1994 all over again?

Whenever bandwidth is discussed, there's always lots of finger pointing because there are so many variables, and players involved, that it's rarely a simple issue. My particular bandwidth bugaboo this morning? I was ticked off that Dropbox (referral) was only uploading at 10 KB/s. I left a 900 MB transfer running all night and it wasn't finished in the morning, and that's when I discovered the awful speed. My first instinct was to point a finger at Dropbox, thinking there was some sort of bandwidth throttling going on. I did a speed test with a tool my ISP provides (speedtest.shaw.ca) and was shocked to see 1.7 Mbps downloads and 107 kbps uploads (Figure 1). It's normally 20x that on downloads and 10x that on uploads, so I knew something was wrong beyond just Dropbox. Read more...

I'm not entirely sure how I ended up finding this page on YouTube's site, but I'm always interested in seeing real-world bandwidth tests, and YouTube probably burns up more bandwidth than any other domain on the planet, so they have some rich data from which to draw upon. Make sure you're logged into YouTube, then check out their historical speed page. The above screenshot shows that I consume YouTube videos at 11.98Mbps average speed; I was surprised to see that the average Canadian rating, and the global rating, were so low. Read more...

I happened to be poking around the Web-based control panel from my ISP today, and I figured I'd check out my modem bandwidth stats. I'll give you one guess which month I installed Mozy in. ;-) I blew past my ISPs 100 GB bandwidth cap that month, but you have to do that three months in a row before they drop the hammer on you. I have to chuckle when I hear people complaining about Comcast's 250 GB bandwidth caps - I bet only people that are complaining are the ones running bitorrent clients 24/7. Unless someone is downloading an Xbox Live HD movie every single day in a month, it's almost impossible to blow through that much bandwidth with legitimate use. But I digress...have a great weekend everyone! And if you want to check out Mozy, use the coupon code APRIL to get 10% off. [Affiliate]