When a 900mps fibre line is pointless?

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rob aylestone

rob aylestone

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I have fibre direct to my home - really speedy up and down, and 80mbs fibre to the local cabinet. Something has just occurred to me, when downloading the same 14Gb library to the studio here. My speed is irrelevant when the system supply the data cannot transfer at a decent speed. On the fibre supper dooper speed at home it took 15 mins - which didn't matter as I was doing something else while it downloaded, but here on the system that has 10% of the speed, the estimated download time is exactly the same!

Have the users spent money on faster and faster speeds, but the servers with the data on them are still very slow? I kind of thought, on reflection that a download from Native Instruments would be really fast - maybe their end is state of the art? Could it be those in between who are limiting it? How does this work? It seems that internet speed test sites have speed enough to test, so why is 14Gb taking a very long time?
 
It'd be worth doing a speed test on a reliable site from both locations, just incase wifi is a bottleneck at one, or both, setups.
14GB over around 15 minutes is more like 120/130mbps downloads.

If your speed tests are showing 900 down, or anywhere close, then your wifi's good and most likely the server providing the data just can't provide it that fast.
It's not uncommon, particularly for a time after some new update is released and everyone's trying to get it.
Always makes me chuckle when some company advertises and hypes their new thing that goes live at midnight, or whatever,
then their site is just inaccessible from midnight because their servers can't cope with the increased load.
 
It is pretty speedy downloading from my NAS drive at home which keeps all my audio and video synchronised, but I expected more from Native? Even Steinberg is a bit quicker. Spitfire Audio seems the fastest - their big downloads do pretty fast speeds - I guess server load their end probably is the issue - but until everyone has fibre, who knows?
 
I suspect that the real advantages of higher speed fiber will be when you have multiple users pulling down larger amounts of data. Living alone, it's a rarity that I have more than one machine downloading anything. Depending on the machine, I get between 50 and 210mb download speeds.

With a family, where you have one kid watching streamed 4K, another playing an online shooter, you're downloading audio and the wife is browsing websites, then the increased capacity will probably keep things from choking the system. My service is speced at 200mb/s and there are a few sites where I can get really fast transfers. Others are subject to the source's capability, so they might top out a 2 or 3mb/s, sometimes even stopping for a few seconds before the download resumes.

I'm considering moving from cable TV to streaming, so I'll probably be looking at higher fiber internet speeds if I make that move.
 
Also realize that the speed also depends on traffic. If 500 people worldwide are trying to download the same files from the same server at the same time, that will affect download time.
 
That's some seriously fast speed, regardless! I'm supposed to have 100/20, just checked and got 34/8 this morning. Guessing the neighbors are all watching streaming videos after taking an extra day off from work!
 
It's funny how those speed tests work. I just ran mine on wifi, and going to the Spectrum site in Columbus OH, I got 28.1mb downloads. Rerunning it, connecting to TeleMedia in New Pekin IN, I got 114.7mb. Was Spectrum having issues? Rerunning again to Spectrum Columbus gave me 119.08 and 123.33mb. Uploads are all around 10 to 11mb. Roundtrip ping time was 41ms.

I can change internet suppliers and get 300/300 for the same price. I just need to get some folks to go to a different email address.
 
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