Orange 512 Kbps - how slow is it?

[zarathustra]

I currently have fibre optic, but will have to downgrade when I move next month, to a very rural location with a much slower rate. The package proposed is ADSL, from Orange and is wireless, but top speed of 512 Kbps (I suspect it will be considerably less in practice). Initially I thought half a meg - that's not so bad really, but does 512 kilobytes per second equate closer to a dial up of 64 kbps? I think it's the kB vs kb, bytes and bits thing which is confusing me.

Although painfully slow, I'm told it is reliable, whilst the satellite systems are expensive, very limited in bandwidth, and prone to problems in bad weather, so I'm sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place.

[Quillan]

It will be a bit quicker than 64. When we had this speed from Orange they gave us a discount because it was under 1mb but we had to ask.

[zarathustra]

Hope so, I'm 7km from the nearest exchange. :)

[Pickles]

Both speeds are quoted in kilo BITS per second rather than kilo BYTES per second. So 512 kbps is somewhat faster than 64 kbps. I had occasion to go back to dial-up for a very short while not so long ago. It was a LOT slower than I remembered it to be - partly because the content of webpages now is rather higher, unless you use the mobile versions or else turn off images etc.

Regards

Pickles

[zarathustra]

I'm still scratching my head a little. If I understand correctly, you have to divide by 8 to get the kilo bytes per second, which is closer to the actual speed you might achieve? In which case a 512KBps (kilo bits) connection would be 64kbps (kilo bytes), and would that mean a dial-up of 64KBps would actually be 8 kilo bytes per second? Does this make any sense? In which case I can see how it might be considerably faster than dial-up.

[pachapapa]

grosso modo 8 times faster.

[Pickles]

[quote user="zarathustra"]I'm still scratching my head a little. If I understand correctly, you have to divide by 8 to get the kilo bytes per second, which is closer to the actual speed you might achieve? In which case a 512KBps (kilo bits) connection would be 64kbps (kilo bytes), and would that mean a dial-up of 64KBps would actually be 8 kilo bytes per second? Does this make any sense? In which case I can see how it might be considerably faster than dial-up.

[/quote]

OK. Forget about bytes for the time being. Let's stick to BITS per second. For technical reasons, analogue dialup speeds are limited to 56 k BITS per second. The 64k bits per second speed that you may have seen quoted comes from the envelope of the signal inside which your dialup signal runs - you won't see this speed. The speed of the ADSL that you are quoting is 512 k BITS per second. Hence it is significantly faster than dial-up.

If you want to start talking about bytes, yes then divide the speeds by 8 - but remember, because of the overheads of transmission (addition of check bits etc) 512k bits does not equate to 64k bytes of useful information.

Regards

Pickles

[Loiseau]

Zarathustra, I am 7km down the line too.

The half-meg system is fine for most routine stuff - and it's a LOT quicker than dialup.
But it's slow for YouTube clips, and would be agonising for watching movies, iPlayer etc, or maybe downloading music.  Luckily I never need to do any of those things.

I have set my mail programme not to receive files over 1MB, as b-i-g images can take for ever to appear.  Mine is a residence secondaire, so most stuff can wait in space till I go back to my faster connection in the UK.  If desperate, I take my laptop down to the local cybercentre in France, or to a better-equiped friend's, and pick up the big stuff via their wi-fi connection.

Angela

[Martin963]

For what it's worth   bytes (or octets in French) tend to measure file sizes.   Whereas line speeds are measured in bits or kilobits per second.   As Ernie says!

So if you watch the download window in your browser while you download a big file it will say something like 62 kB/s or 62 kO/s.    Multiply that by 8 and you get to a 512 kb/s line speed,   they normally run at about 480 kb/s.    That's the sort of figure we get here,   but in England our file download speed is nearer 230 kB/s giving a line speed of about 1800 kbps,  or 1.8 Mbps.

One could happily bash the person who thought that BIG Bs and little bs wouldn't confuse all but the geeks....

[AnOther]

[quote user="Martin963"]One could happily bash the person who thought that BIG Bs and little bs wouldn't confuse all but the geeks....

[/quote]He's probably working for DWP now and responsible for renaming all the individual E forms to S1 !!!

[zarathustra]

Thanks everyone for all your replies - I think it's all starting to make more sense to me now. :) It's a relief to know it will be faster than dial-up... I can live without YouTube and large video downloads - I've done all I've wanted with the fibre optic, and a slower Internet might encourage me to come away from the computer more often! Also great to know that being 7km from the exchange may not mean impede the speed too much. Would being on a wireless connection (very convenient for me) slow things a little though, or would it be worth while plugging in directly?

[Patricia]

I am on the system you are considering with Orange. I am the last one on our line and 7.2kms away, but have no competition for the ADSL as we live in a remote area with very few neighbours and even fewer who have a computer. I have been told by other suppliers, on many occasions, that I cannot have ADSL as I am too far away. I was the first one in our village to go on-line so it worked straightaway but it can be slow on occasions. I notice it most when it is a weekend or school holidays when it is being used by neighbours' visitors.

My friend regularly brings her laptop here and uses it by wireless connection to mine (which is plugged in) and we have not seen a noticeable difference.

Regards - Patricia

[AnOther]

In simple terms ADSL refers to the technology of an always on

connection and has no definition in terms of speed so anything other

than dial up is ADSL.

Unless working at the extremity of distance even at it's slowest the WiFi connection to your router should be be into the 10's of mhZ so will rarely if ever hamper the actual ADSL speed.

For distances of 6-7km extended reach ADSL (READSL) is to be preferred, if available. AFAIK only Orange offer this.

Fast is nice but I've asked the question before, who actually needs more than about 2mb's [Www]

[Martin963]

[quote user="AnOther"]even at it's slowest the WiFi connection to your router should be be into the 10's of mhZ so will rarely if ever hamper the actual ADSL speed. [Www]

[/quote]

Pedantic swot mode on

At 10's of mhZ it would take centuries to transfer even a tiny file.

You meant 10's of MHz I think.

Pedantic swot mode off

(Sorry ernie,  couldn't resist).

[Dave&Olive]

hi ok

                  512 kbps  is great for watching Dr Kildare on youtube !!!  thats about what we get

                              Dave

[zarathustra]

Would Orange immediately offer AFAIK, or would I need to ask, and does it usually cost more? Too many acronyms - my head is swimming.

I know one of the neighbours has the Internet (dial-up though). There's only about half a dozen houses in the hamlet, but I don't know if the other hamlets within the 7km from the exchange will impact the speed? As long as I can get webpages to come up without it being too much like watching paint dry, I'm not too bothered by speed - I can always switch off the graphics in Firefox to speed things up, though I do have some personal websites that I will need to check, update and upload to from time to time.

[Pierre ZFP]

Don't forget that the upload speed will be only a small fraction of the download speed.   It would be interesting to know what Orange quote for uploads.

[zarathustra]

Cheers, fortunately I do know uploads are much slower... If I'm desperate I'll see if I can't FTP it through my partner's android - it's ironic that it has better capabilities than my future Internet.

[Loiseau]

[quote user="zarathustra"].....Would being on a wireless connection (very convenient for me) slow things a little though, or would it be worth while plugging in directly?
[/quote]

I'm on a wireless connection, with a "Livebox" supplied by Orange.  It also comes with an ethernet cable, if you should want to plug the computer in - quite useful the time I brought my desktop Mac over, and it did not want to know about the wi-fi.    With my laptop PC I have tried both wi-fi and ethernet, and it does not seem to make any difference speedwise.

Angela

[zarathustra]

Thanks Angela - seems to put my mind to rest, as my new office will be the former dining room, and I don't think there's a phone socket in there. Hopefully thick stone walls won't impede the wireless connection.

[powerdesal]

Thick stone walls will certainly attenuate the signal

[zarathustra]

To reach my new office, it has to pass through one thin wall, and a thick wall, but with glass door, so hopefully I'll be alright... If worse comes to worse, I'll ask to have a new telephone socket installed.