Spiga

How Fast Does Your Data Swim Upstream?

Just upgraded my Internet connection to 4Mbps. This means I can download a 5MB MP3 File in 10 seconds or an 800MB movie file in 25 minutes given the right conditions. Am I happy? Yes, but not quite.  See, my previous speed was 2MBps downstream, which is really an OK service for me, except the upstream was just 256MBps and when I upgraded to 4MBps,  my upstream struck out at 320MBps.

Our Internet Service Providers (ISP) do not advertise this, and neither do they give us any info about it either, but
upstream bandwidth still almost always takes a back seat to downstream (at least, on consumer-grade connections), and Web browsing is arguably still the activity most people engage in most of the time. But browsing isn't the only thing people use the Internet for anymore — not by a long shot. The truth is that for just about any Internet-based application other than Web browsing, the speed of your upstream connection can be as important as — and in many cases, perhaps more important than — your downstream connection.

The most obvious example of this is uploading files. It doesn't matter if you're sending someone an e-mail attachment, uploading a ton of photos to an online sharing site like Flickr, or running a P2P file-sharing application like BitTorrent — they all rely heavily (or exclusively) on the speed of your upstream connection. Want to upload your latest video creation to YouTube? Don't hold your breath — it's probably going to take a while. --winplanet.com

Most broadband connections offer upstream speeds ranging anywhere from 96 to 768 Kbps, but unless you're at the middle-to-high end of that range, you will likely benefit from a faster connection. You can check the performance of both sides of your connection using online speed tests such as from the one I used to take mine, at SpeedTest.net.

0 comments:

Post a Comment