Category: Internet

Inevitability

It had to come in the end – NTL will shortly be introducing traffic shaping between 18:00 and 23:00. It slipped into the user policy on Friday although it has been announced today that this was ‘a mistake‘. I’ve got mixed views on this. Most other broadband comp’s are doing this and they do have to make a profit for the service they provide. I would prefer a strict download cap though rather than shaping during certain hours as I hate leaving the pc switched on when not in use – such a waste. I also want the full fat speed when I use the PC – why not implement harder caps and charge more for those that use/abuse the service rather than hampering everyone’s speed?

On the other hand if users are honest the traffic being shaped is peer to peer and Usenet – when was the last time you used these technologies legitametly on a repeated basis? I’ve not so have I got any reason to complain?

However movie and TV companies are moving onto download services, some using torrent technology (including NTL). How many people will download a DVD sized movie which takes 24 hours rather than 3 due to the shaping that’s been applied. Not me. I guess that NTL won’t traffic shape their own paid for service either.

Weighing up the issues I’m now in the camp that thinks if it guarantees a good service for surfing, e-mailing and gaming then traffic shaping is a good thing to do. While it prevents some things it at least gives me a service for the legal activities that my connection is used for.

Speaking of legal…my downloading via Usenet has almost dropped to zero. DVD downloading is just too much hassle – much rather buy the DVD and watch it. With the 360 I’ve got no urge to download any Xbox titles, I’m back buying music and I’ve got no need for any hacked apps. Sky HD is on the way too – I won’t be downloading TV shows anymore. Is it just me?

Java Apps

Couple of nice apps for your phone. First is Opera Mini (cheers Shak) which is a great browser – much better than the 750i built in browser – feels a lot quicker and you can see more on the screen. Second is ShoZu which allows you to easily name, tag and upload your photo’s to Flickr and other online photo sharing sites from your phone.

Makes me want more from my phone like some of the PDA app’s I used to use on the Palm. Contract on the 750i finishes next month so it’s time to start looking for a phone that does a bit more than take photo’s and play mp3’s.

Google Page Creator

Google Page Creator has just launched. You get 100Meg of space, a basic web page creator and a page manager to arrange your site. No mention of bandwidth restrictions either. Not a replacement for having your own web host but if you setting up a smallish site, say for a local group, it’s not too shabby especially as it’s free although you do need a GMail account (I’ve 100 invites just in case someone still doesn’t have one). Crashed once though while I knocked this up.

30 Boxes

The latest Web 2.0 app to gain oooh’s and aahh’s is 30boxes.com, an online calendar app. It’s just launched an open beta (Is there ANY web app that actually launched as a beta and has publicly said it’s out of that phase. I’m looking at you Google & Flickr.) Functionality is rich in some respects in that it’s purely web based but light in others. For example it can pick up any rss feed – Flickr, your website feed etc and link the images and posts to the day they were published. Equally it has strong support for import and export of data and also tagging support.

But why can’t the tags and hence the appointment be coloured? No pda support? Do I really want to share my calendar with everyone? Good for a small workgroup or business but not too practical for me to be sharing my calendar with everyone else although I don’t have to share – it’s just a much lauded feature of this app that I won’t use.

Still – early days and it is a beta so I’m hoping there is much to come including a bigger server as it’s currently swamped. I love little touches like entering appointments in english and it works out when the appointment is. Neat.

Broadband Joy

Finally I have a fast and stable broadband connection thanks to NTL. It was installed last Friday and since then I have not had one disconnect. Contrast with Freedom2Surf’s LLU service which was flaky and prone to disconnects. I also seemed to suffer some accusations of lag while gaming online although I was never entirely convinced it was me. Saying that, there has been no lag at all since NTL was installed.

Secondly the speed is impressive – most impressive. About 30 minutes after the line was installed I took an ADSLGuide speedtest which you can see here. Almost a full fat 10Meg connection. Real world speeds i.e. downloading, streaming and general web surfing have also been very impressive. Web pages were a lot snappier than previous suggesting that NTL’s DNS servers are working really well compared to my last two providers.

Contention however can definitely be seen with NTL but not to the same extent as the ADSL network in my area. Yes I’m in a Glasgow on a big exchange (western) but to slow down at night to less than 50k/sec is pretty unacceptable. I should have been seeing 6Meg. I find NTL is dropping to 4-6Meg in the evening but at other times maintains the 9-10Meg speeds. SO after one week I can only recommend NTL’s cable service. I’ll update later in the year once I’ve had more experience of their long term performance.

Finally – Freedom2Surf have lost the plot. I cancelled with them last week but they had the cheek to phone this week and offer 2 free months connection and a promise to fix all my issues. I wasn’t impressed with this at all – why not fix the problem while I’m a paying customer and not when I leave. Sounded like they have had quite a few users leave recently. They also admitted today that they have been traffic shaping over the last weeks. I wish they had been up front so that people knew this was happening – it would have saved a lot of wasted time and money in contacting their support desks. Their reputed honesty and good support seems to have gone out of the window. In case you haven’t figured it out I didn’t take them up on their free months offer. Good riddance.

Bye Bye F2S

3 months. That’s how long I lasted with Freedom2Surf. I’m so glad I took a monthly contract as it means I can get out easily. I should have known I would have problems when Pipex bought Freedom2Surf and Sky bought Easynet (who provide the LLU line) within a week of me moving.

Firstly – LLU. It’s just not stable at the moment. I can live with a drop in speed at night due to contention (which will affect more and more people as the speeds increase throughout this year) but I cannot live with a flaky connection that has a tendency to drop. Easynet’s solution was to drop me to 6Meg from 8Meg. This meant the SNR level was mostly respectable but even when high the connection would pop at odd times.

I mentioned drop in speed – at night it was dropping to less than 1Meg and a 150k upload. That’s the worse I’ve seen in a long time. Although I criticised Plusnet at least they kept the speeds at an acceptable level although they did it by shaping the connection and not telling anyone about it.

Support at F2S is also poor. They don’t respond to e-mails or any of the tickets raised on their website. You can only contact them through a support line that costs a fair whack…typically you will wait around 20-50 minutes in a queue although I found phoning at around 11-11:30AM got me through quite quickly. The support guys sound knowledgeable but out of the four promised phone calls I would get next day over the last 3 months I got one about 10 days after I logged a call. Just not good enough.

So – time to go. I want a fast but most importantly stable connection so who to turn to? My line looks to support 6 Meg max via ADSL so as the speeds go up over the next few years I’ll be stuck at that speed. Left me with one option – NTL. So this Friday NTL will be installing a 10Meg line. I’ve no doubt it will suffer contention in the same way that ADSL does but hopefully it will be more stable and also the 10Meg speed is very appealing even if it maxes out at 8-9Meg. I also feel NTL has a far better infrastructure in the long term than BT has – I blame Thatcher for that one.

So – out of the frying pan, into the fire?

Video Treats

These have all probably done the rounds but they are new to me so I thought I would share.

First up are High Speed Video clips. Sounds pretty dull and the web page is very 90’s but the content is superb. Highly recommended are the face slaps and punches. The jello clip is also eye opening and the paintball shot proves just how sore these shots can be.

Next up is Sabine who spends her time driving folk around the Nurburgring. The video shows just how fast she goes and also how lucky the Scottish passenger is. Dog.

And finally – set phasers tae malky. Enjoy.

Broadband Update

It’s been three days since my 8Meg line was switched on. So far the speed performance has been very impressive – I still can’t get over just how fast my downloads are. Files really are just taking seconds to grab. Mail speed is also excellent and the DNS issues have settled down.

Not so good is that on Thursday and Saturday between 6 & 8pm I got disconnected a couple of times. After some investigating I’m putting it down to the condition of my line and not F2S or the LLU provider Easynet. The key factor is that as the speeds of broadband increase the quality of your line becomes all the more important.
Continue reading “Broadband Update”

Whooooosh

After a week without broadband F2S and Easynet finally got their act together today and I’m now back getting my bb rush. My connection speed seems a bit ‘floaty’ at the moment but a download speeds between 6 & 7Meg is not to be sniffed at – ADSLGuide test results. Upload speed is nice at over 600k – be interesting to see how that affects my Xbox hosting abilities.

F2S DNS servers seem less than rock solid so I’ve moved to a different providers but apart from that there is nothing bad to report. Downloads from newsgroups were topping out at around 650k/sec. The LLU line seems more susceptible to MTU & RWIN tweaking. I managed to get close to 7Meg but then got greedy and saw the connection drop to around 3.5Meg.

However it’s great to have broadband back. Dial-up was amazingly slow – so many sites are now set-up for fast users it made most unusable. Even e-mails took a long time to download. Maybe I’m just looking back through rose tinted specs, maybe I’m to used to the fast speeds but I’m sure when I used dial-up all the time it was slow but not that slow. When iTunes 6 came out last night I chuckled at the thought of downloading 30Meg – it would have taken forever. Today it took less than a minute.