Orange Speed Cap?

[JonDuncan]

My connection speed is about 5 and a half meg. I can watch live streams up to BBC's HD output without problem. But when it come to downloading, either through direct site downloads through a browser or Vuze, my speed never goes above 500 kB/sec. I have tried researching the question and there seems to be talk of Orange capping "excessive downloading" .... Am I imagining a mountain out of a molehill or might it be worth a rant on the English helpline?

[Jonzjob]

Why rant Jon? Why not just give them a bell and ask why the difference. I just wish that we had above 1/2 meg [:(]

[Danny]

[quote user="JonDuncan"]might it be worth a rant on the English helpline?

[/quote]

I don't think that will get you anywhere.

Orange (among others) have been accused of limiting speeds from certain (usually video) sites but they deny doing this.

here for example

http://www.numerama.com/magazine/17815-megavideo-denonce-le-bridage-par-orange.html

Here are 60 pages of French forum posts to wade through on this very subject

http://www.forum-orange.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=19152

Danny

[JonDuncan]

Thank you for the replies. It's alright Jonzjob, my version of ranting is a mild, timorous even, interjection with no threatening undertones. And sorry about your speed issues, having spent eight years on sloooooow dial-up until last summer, I do understand ...

Thanks for the links Danny, afraid I haven't got through all 60 pages yet but it does confirm I'm not alone, actually I will have a good look at that whole forum, should learn a lot.

[powerdesal]

When I complained about my slow speed internet, 2.8mbps download against the ''supposed'' 8mbps I was told that above 2.0 mbps was within the agreement !!!!!!!!!!

Having complained (almost) endlessly about drop-outs and low speed they eventually changed the overhead line between the house and the nearest pole. I now have between 4 and 5 mbps - wonderful.

In the nearest town, 4 kms up the road, they have 16+mbps

[Rabbie]

Slow download speeds are not necessarily the fault of your ISP. They are often caused by issues at the site you are downloading from. If it is a popular item and a busy time of day when others are also downloading  you won't get the speed you expect. Analogous with the slow speeds on motorways on bank holidays.

[powerdesal]

I do realise that Rabbie, but........when you get slow speed on all the sites you use you tend to think its not a particular site related problem. Which it obviously wasn't.

[AnOther]

When it comes to benchmarking your download speed virtually all the test sirtes such as Speedtest.net etc. give such variable results as to be useless for establishing the max for your line.

A better way is to download a test file from here http://fuller.zen.co.uk/test and time it. This is a reliable and consistent test which you can repeat whenever you think things might not be up to snuff.

On a solid 1mb connection the 10mb files come down in about 1m20secs so you can extrapolate your speed from that.

I have never found any difference between the zero.bin and nonzero.bin files BTW.

[JonDuncan]

Just watching the speed as it downloads is what I do. The 10 MB test files you linked to

AnOther,

took about twelve seconds to dowload for me, registering a speed of 512.8 KB/s.

[JonDuncan]

Well I've been messing around with my speed-gazing over the last few days and can see I am been capped by Orange at 512KB/s without any doubt. One interesting (to me) way of doing it is when using Vuze, if you have a very fast download available, to get to my capped top speed of 500 odd, then in the settings available you lower the speed to 200 for a few seconds and then put the option back to unlimited. My speed would then shoot up 900 and then drop back after a couple of seconds to 500 and stay there again.

Anyway, I wonder if this is the same with other providers like SFR or Free, does anyone know? I find it quite annoying because before I moved house, I was getting uncapped speeds on the same Livebox on the same knackered old laptop .... [:)]

[halfblind]

As you mention Vuze I assume you are downloading torrents - can I also assume these are legal and not copyright protected ?

In some cases ISP's will reduce the speed available to certain ports known for torrent downloading of copyright material.

[Jonzjob]

Now, who in their right minds would EVER download anything that wern't legal in every way, or indeed do anything at all illegal?[:-))]

[AnOther]

I wonder if you are getting in a twist with the numbers. 512KBps (Kilo Byte p/sec) is equal to approximately 4MBps (Mega Byte p/sec) that said though a time of 12 seconds for the 10mb test file would imply a speed considerably faster than that. This site explains it and has some useful calculators too www.numion.com/YourSpeed3/Faq.html

I doubt you are being capped but instead are maxing out your connection, brief bursts above that are not necessarily indicative of potential real world performance

Out of interest what speed do you think you have, or should have, and what does www.degrouptest.com say about your line in terms of length and attenuation. Also what actual attenuation does your livebox report and is it consistent with Degrouptest ?

With your livebox attenuation and noise margin you can estimate the maximum possible theoretical speed here http://212.23.23.177/ADSL/default.aspx

You won't know your sync speed because the livebox does not report it so put in what it says is your maximum throughput (I think thats what it's called from memory) or up to 50% more.

JJ: And who uses torrents anyway, [Www]

[JonDuncan]

Thanks for replying again AnOther - I was getting better speeds not that long ago in my current location as well as my previous one and actually the line speed has gone up a bit in that time too, it's approximately 5300 kb/s .

 On Livebox I get this:

Attenuation Up : 20.8 dB; Attenuation Down : 47.0 dB; Noise margin up : 8 dB; Noise margin down : 10 dB.

Degrouptest reports "longueur de ligne : 4264 mètres; affaiblissement théorique : 44.104 dB"

And on the attenuation test site, it says It would appear your line is under performing with regard to ADSL, this may be due to issues like the ring wire, unfiltered equipment and other factors. Ideally you would expect to see connection speeds of 7375Kbps or higher at your attenuation

Basically it is no big issue I know, and I'm glad to have the amount of speed that I do, but I get perfect performance on sites like the BBC IPlayer streaming video at 1500kbs and even 3200 for HD programming, and that's through a proxy! Is there any correlation between streaming and downloading? I would have thought so but I don't know.

[AnOther]

TBH with that line length I would most definitely not be expecting 5.3mb which strongly suggests that the estimate for your line length is wrong, a very real possibility as I know from personal experience. The attenuation reported by a router on the other hand can't really lie and is about the only statistic you have which you can rely upon to be accurate.

Working with that then, and in nominal 'ball park' numbers, if you look at this chart

http://www.internode.on.net/residential/adsl_broadband/easy_broadband/performance

your attenuation of 47db suggests a line length closer to 3400m which you will see tallies roughly with the 5.3mb you say you get.

For 4264m your attenuation would be expected to be somewhere in the region of 58db giving a maximum speed of around 3mb.

The attenuation quoted on Degrouptest and similar sites is taken from FT's database and is not a measured value but a calculated one worked out from the various bits of line which comprise your line in total. Beside 'longueur de ligne' is a + and if you click that it will say something like xxxx m 4/10 -  xxxx m 6/10. Those numbers refer to lengths of line and their diameters, 4/10 equalling 0.4mm and 6/10 0.6mm etc. The relative losses for the various cable sizes are:

4 /10 - 15dB/km
5 /10 - 12.4dB/km
6 /10 - 10.3dB/
8 /10 - 7.9dB/km

If you care to do the sums you'll arrive at the same exact 3 or 4 decimal places attenuation you see on Degrouptest !

In practical terms streaming and downloading are effectively one and the same thing.

[Rabbie]

[quote user="Jonzjob"]Now, who in their right minds would EVER download anything that wern't legal in every way, or indeed do anything at all illegal?[:-))]
[/quote]And if they were, they would certainly not admit to it on a public forum[:D]