Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with bandwidth

How big a pipeline?

BigLankyBastard — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 07:52:51 -0800

Is there a straightforward set of recommendations or standards for how much internet bandwidth to set up per number of expected users? I have been asked to consult on a project to provide internet access to a large apartment building. There are between 60 and 80 units in the building. I am fairly sure that their current plan regarding the shared internet connection will be inadequate, but I have had a very hard time finding any source to back up my instinct, let alone any simple way to calculate what the shared bandwidth SHOULD be for that many home users.

Bonus points for anyone who points me to a company that provides that sort of large-scale shared internet access.

Video Chat requirements

lake59 — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:52:15 -0800

Our Organization uses Windows live messenger to connect clients at remote locations (children and their parents who are separated by distance). We chose this program because of it's ease of use/install for the general public. Unfortunately, some of the connections are poor quality; the video cuts out or the voice is garbled or the connection stalls altogether. MS says all that is required is dial up but we always require broadband to connect. i cannot find a comprehensive list of system/bandwidth requirements or troubleshooting tips. Any help in these areas would be excellent! Thank you!

What sites do you jump on to waste excess bandwidth?

jakubsnm — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:24:59 -0800

What sites do you jump on to waste excess bandwidth? I always end up with a few Gigs of downloads left. I usually jump on Apple Trailers.

I already use torrents, just wondering if there's any other sites you guys/girls know of...

How do I restrict internet traffic?

LDL707 — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:53:23 -0800

Is there a way to limit download/uploads through my internet connection? My house has Comcast cable internet, and every month, we are very close to the 250 GB bandwidth cap. This is primarily due to my roommates running bittorrent and leaving it up all day.

I am running a Linksys router with Tomato firmware. Ideally, my goal would be to block bittorrent traffic once the total uploads and downloads equal about 7 gigs per day. That is, up to 7 gigs a day, the internet connection is undisturbed, and after that point, other internet functions like http would still work, but bittorrent would be disabled.

Is there a way to completely block traffic through a specific protocol with QoS, and is it possible to set up a rule so that this would only happen after the 7GB limit is reached?

Help me move a huge file across the net is as fast a time as possible.

BrodieShadeTree — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:23:16 -0800

I'd like to move a big file (110gig) to a business associate across the internet. The file must arrive in as fast a time frame as possible in order to update a database with as little downtime as possible. FTP is an option, but the other party feels it might chew into their user bandwidth for too long. Are there file moving/bandwidth leasing options available for this sort of one time thing?

Which term: Bandwidth, Throughput, Download Speed, Else?

Quarter Pincher — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:30:42 -0800

Throughput, download speed, bandwidth, or something else -- which of these am I trying to say? I can download a huge file, topping speeds of around 140 KB/s. Is 140 KB/s my maximum download speed? And isn't that speed the same for all information I can receive, or just file transfers? I was trying to tell a friend that my DSL recently got bumped up in speed -- when I noticed that my previously-familiar download speed of 80 KB/s (kilobytes per second) is now suddenly in the 120-140 KB/s range, without a change in service plans. He tried to tell me that "download speed" isn't the right term, but couldn't offer an alternative or bother to explain the differences.

I'm from the 2400 baud modem era, and typically estimated my max bandwidth (my word) by the maximum apparent speed at which I could download a large file (a RAR for instance) the quickest, and assumed that's the maximum by which information of any kind could reach me. When I moved up to a 56,600 baud on dialup, I could pull down from 3.5KB/s to 4.5KB/s tops on a big file. Now with the DSL, I was getting 80KB/s, but now I'm getting 140 KB/s max download speeds. Is that my bandwidth, or download speed, or throughput, or what?

We play Halo 3 on XBL regularly, and he asserted that the communicating speed from x360 to XBL server is calculated differently than being governed by whatever limiter governs my 140 KB/s, but that doesn't make much sense to me. Hivemind, clear us both up!

Why has it taken so long for internet multimedia to match TV and telephones in speed and latency?

lunchbox — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 23:34:46 -0800

Why has it taken so long for internet multimedia to match TV and telephones in speed and latency? It was only recently that my internet connection finally became able to deliver decent-quality streaming video & audio, and reliable voice over IP that doesn't suffer from delays and distortions. Yet this quality of video and audio multimedia has been possible for many decades through TV, telephone, and radio. Why is it seemingly so much more challenging technologically to deliver high-throughput signals over the internet than through these traditional media? Is it because one is digital and one is analog? Or because of the internet has a more complex architecture? Or something else?

Info source on bandwidth caps & download quotas?

kidbritish — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:40:09 -0800

Is there a website that tracks ISP's bandwidth caps and download quotas, and presents the information in an up-to-date and easy-to-read format? I'm especially interested in USA.

Share – 1.the full or proper portion or part allotted or belonging to or contributed or owed by an individual or group.

mu~ha~ha~ha~har — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:49:09 -0800

One internet connection shared between three computers. One jackass who uses the entire download limit(!!) and gets our speed capped(!!). So, what software or hardware solutions might there be?? Secrecy isn't a concern. That they are too stupid to be trusted is. Is there maybe something that monitors where the data is going? And also a way to hobble their line speed, once they've reached their 'share'. (I'd prefer not to just yank their cable out completely, but whatever.) I have no idea (keywords to google??) so I'm completely open to suggestion on this :) Thanks! *Other info...?
Our ISP only records a grand total. The modem (Dlink DSL-G604T) only keeps a 24hr log. (Of whatever info it is that it does collect??)
The computer in question runs XP and connects to the modem via a standard ethernet cable. It's also the only one that really needs its data being counted, if that makes it any easier?

How to stream radio w/o the bandwidth?

jaseaco — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:25:49 -0800

How can I enjoy streaming radio at work without hogging bandwidth? I just got the email - no more streaming radio/video due to bandwidth issues at my work. Is there anything I can do?

I usually listen to last.fm or Pandora, and I am now finding it painful to live without it. I thought about maybe using logmein.com or some other remote access program to access my computer at home, but doesn't that hog bandwidth too?

Are the latest Blackberries (Curve, etc) able to stream music?

Thanks in advance...

Cue ambient, thoughtful music

chairface — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:03:42 -0800

On the podcast for This American Life, Ira claims NPR spends $140,000-$160,000 per year just on bandwidth for the podcast. To those of you who do hosting & have some vague idea how much bandwidth TAL's podcast would take: Does this seem reasonable to you? This seems like an outrageous cost for a podcast. I did some quick math based on some cheap hosting and came out with around 13TB per month for a cost of $150,000 per year. That seems like way, way more than any podcast would need but I don't really know. Is Ira blowin' smoke to make me cough up the dollars?

I did donate so please, no lectures.

i want my internet back (while uploading photos)

buttercup — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:08:19 -0800

I'm having bandwidth allocation issues between different pieces of software on my Mac (10.5.5). When uploading photos using the flickr uploader or when the computer is backing up using Mozy, both of these programs tend to use all the available bandwidth on my dsl line. This makes it nearly impossible to use the internet for anything else on this machine or my PC laptop. Is there a way to adjust the bandwidth that these programs use?

Bandwidth problems

Mr_Zero — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:55:57 -0800

I have a Business Cox Internet account which is supposed to be 6mb/s down and 768kb/s up. The problem is that it never comes close to providing those speeds. I spent about an hour on the phone yesterday with a tech support guy. It was a terrible circular discussion that hinged completely on speakeasy's bandwidth test. His position was that since speakeasy's results showed that I was getting the proper amount of bandwidth everything was fine. I have several servers that sit on PureGig's backbone here in Phoenix. I also have some domains hosted at DreamHost . Despite my servers being somewhat robust and having an insane amount of bandwidth available to them, I can not download from them at speeds greater than 800 kb/s. A mere tenth of the bandwidth I am paying for. It is the same when pulling stuff from DreamHost.

On top of that I started looking at my download speeds for things like Firefox updates and other large files. None of them achieve speeds over 800 kb/s and virtually all of them peak out at about 150 kb/s.

So a tech guy comes out this morning and does the speakeasy test and says everything is fine. I show him example after example of real world speeds that never exceeded 800 kb/s. He just kept saying but the Speakeasy test shows that you are getting the bandwidth you are supposed to.

In a perfect world downloading the latest version of Firefox should take no more than 10 seconds, however it consistently takes almost 6 minutes. I know that it will never be 10 seconds but 6 minutes? Speakeasy tests before and after downloads continue to show over 6000 kb/s.

The only possible explanation I can come up with is that Cox is throttling traffic from everywhere but speakeasy. What tools are there out there that can help me figure out what is happening between a remote machine and my office computer?

I want to be able to show them hard evidence that their network is the culprit.

Understanding throughput..the right way..

hboogz — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 06:57:04 -0800

Firewall and VPN throughput: Please help me understand the real world difference ? I'm working on examining different firewall's to replace an existing Nokia IP 380.

I see different throughput numbers being thrown around by different vendors and it gets rather confusing for me.

Take for example, a FW throughput as advertised at 1 Gbps and VPN throughput as advertised at 600 Mbps.

I only have 1 firewall and about 50 IPSEC VPNs; personally,it doesn't make sense to buy a firewall that can handle such throughput if the line coming into my office is just 1.5 Mbps ?

All VPN's at the site have T1's and the main site has a T1, so what's the point of getting a firewall that encrypts/decrypts traffic at 600 Mbps ?

And VPN throughput is combined into the overall FW throughput ?

I took a look at the device utilization of the firewall between yesterday and today and got this -- i'm really uncertain how to analyze that and correctly size the new FW ?

On average i believe the current FW is running about 40 Mbps..

I know i'm not understanding something correctly, so please someone please school me...

I really don't want to go over my limit.

By The Grace of God — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:59:51 -0800

How can I tell what's included in the flat-rate bit of my vodafone blackberry, and what's coming out of my 500 MB? I just finally successfully downloaded google maps on my curve 8310 using pocketmac, and it is so much better than either vodafone maps or blackberry maps. However when you scroll a tiny bit up it's all "350kb" and stuff. That will add up quickly!

I am on UK vodafone, and it comes with a 12 month vodafone sat nav subscription.. I pay 30 quid a month and get 500 mb of internets with that, plus I also have the £5/month blackberry email subscription.

So what's coming out of my 500 mb/month? Does Blackberry crapbrowser get excluded, but not Opera? Does that vodafone sat nav free subscription mean the baffling and confusing maps it gives me are at least free for the now? What about BB maps and google maps?

What about when I receive, and then decide to open an attachment on my email that's pushed to the phone? Is there a good faq somewhere for this?

Per VHost Apache Bandwidth Stats

Brian Puccio — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 06:56:14 -0800

Linux/Unix Admin Filter: What is your preferred method for monitoring bandwidth use per virtual host in Apache? I could just log everything and run AWStats/Webalizer/whatever, but that seems overkill when all I really want is a MRTG or RRD Tool graph for each virtual host to indicate bandwidth used the last day, week, month and year. Do you use the impossible to find mod_watch or something else?

what are the options for very low bandwidth PC-to-PC VoIP?

thewalrus — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:13:13 -0800

I'm looking for a software PC-to-PC VoIP program that will handle an extremely low bandwidth connection with high UDP packet loss. This is to reach a person at the far end of a highly contended (8:1 or greater) TDMA VSAT connection. Total bandwidth available to the client PC at the far end of the satellite link is about 64 kbps. Skype does not work properly due to >45% UDP packet loss and high latency jitter. We need something that moves about 3.5KB/s or less of data each direction while providing a moderately decent voice call quality. It does not need to be able to reach the PSTN or accept incoming calls from phones, strictly PC-to-PC functionality. Nothing like SkypeOut is required. Can anyone suggest software that will do this? I know that Yahoo Messenger and the latest Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN messenger) do video and audio-only chats, but I'm not sure about the minimum bandwidth requirements.

The alternative is of course text-only chat (Pidgin, Adium etc connected to various networks) or IRC, which works flawlessly, but we'd really like to be able to establish a voice connection.

Internet Speed tests lie, my connection sucks!

toekneebullard — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:43:45 -0800

Why is it when I take internet speed tests my rating is great, but overall my browsing is miserably sluggish? OK, so I've called Comcast at least 10 times, and every time they go through the same crap: Unlpug modem, restart it, blah blah blah. A few times they've had me take speed tests to "prove" my connection is fine, but again, normal browsing is slow.

Here are the results from a couple tests:
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
Download Speed: 12963 kbps (1620.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 950 kbps (118.8 KB/sec transfer rate)

http://www.speedtest.net/
Download: 10223 kb/s
Upload: 710 kb/s

I'm running Firefox 3 on a pretty nice computer. My wife is running the same on an older computer, both get the sluggish net result.

So why is it the tests say I have great speed, but browsing is so slow?

Thanks for any help,
Tony

Web Hosting With Generous Bandwidth Limits

jimmyjimjim — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:53:26 -0800

I need web hosting, and my needs are pretty narrow. I don't need fancy tools or applications, everything I'm doing is pretty much text. I don't need hand-holding or customer service. But what I DO need is to not have to worry that if any of my domains (I've got five or six) go viral, I'll be socked with $$$$ bandwidth overage bills. That happened to me once a long time ago, and I still have trauma scars. I realize that no hosting service can offer, like, infinite bandwidth. At a certain point, service would either cut off or else overage charges will cut in. But are there any web hosting outfits out there known to have particularly generous bandwidth limits, and reasonably priced overage charges beyond those limits?

What to do with spare download bandwidth?

kureshii — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:57:09 -0800

Is there anything meaningful I can do with 10Mbps worth of spare download bandwidth? My ISP recently has an offer on a 10Mbps connection, under a 2-year contract. I've been thinking about getting a separate connection, mainly because the price is good and because I want a good upload bandwidth for torrent-seeding (don't ask).

That plan comes with 1Mbps upload bandwidth which, as mentioned, will be largely used for torrent-seeding. That leaves the 10Mbps download bandwidth largely unemployed. I will still be downloading every so often, but hardly enough to put more than the occasional dent in it.

This is where I need to pick your brains. Are there any meaningful projects out there requiring spare bandwidth, and if so, how can I contribute? Is there are other way I can put it to good use?

I've also been thinking about social network-related experiments and data-logging webcrawlers that would gather historical, social and other data (of course, ideally without maiming other servers), but have yet to think of a meaningful way to turn that into useful insights or conclusions.

If anyone has ideas on what to do with that download bandwidth (that would preferably leave my upload bandwidth alone), please hit me with them =)

How to handle media upload when traveling far and light?

XiBe — Wed, 21 May 2008 02:09:12 -0800

My little brother will in a few months embark in a year-long trip around Asia (India, Vietnam, Thailand...), towards Australia as final destination. He asks me to set up a blog for him - easy does it, I'm a WordPress translator. But what about media? And in general, what should I not forgot to make sure we get the best from his experience while not making it hard for him to communicate? See, he'll be traveling light (so no laptop) and potentially deep in unknown territories, where there's little chance he'll cross any Internet cafe, let alone a computer with broadband - I might be wrong, of course, but I'm speaking with the experience of a friend who works at a resort in Laos valley, and he has limited (monthly) bandwidth at his workplace.

So, while it's gonna be easy for him to update said blog with text, media are another matter, and I have a few advices to ask for.
- How should he handle his files? With limited bandwidth, he cannot upload full size image, but he cannot edit them down either to take as few Mb as possible. Likewise, I don't want him to take pictures at minimal resolution just for this reason, since he'll certainly want to get them full size and on paper once he gets back home.
- He'll be carrying more than one X Gb cards for his camera, but those will run out quickly if he cannot dump them from time to time. I know there are dedicated card-dumping portable HDs these days, but I hear they're not reliable. Anyone has experience on this?
- Any tips on a light, good and sturdy camera, with standards cards that he can buy over there by the dozen?
- Videos are bound to be made, but weight way more than pictures. Should he avoid making them?
- More generally, what should I setup for him to ease the message transmission between his faraway land and the whole family back home? - again, with as little bandwidth use on his side as possible. Should I use my own server for hosting, or rely for instance on Flickr and it's (I suppose) many CDNs in the region?

Lastly, what are the cool traveler/around-the-world blog that you know?

Disagreement with co-web developer about speed difference of height and width specified in image tags as opposed to in the css

semidivine — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:36:28 -0800

I am having a disagreement with a co-web developer I'm working with. He's insisting that having image width and height specified for images in the image tags is going to make an enormous difference in how fast this database driven site will render, while I feel that having the height and width called in the css for these images is enough. The site is very fast. Let me clarify... I'm only talking about the thumbnails of images on the site (the data), all other images used for design etc. have image heights and widths specified. I feel that even if we lose a nano-second in speed (we have dedicated servers and enough bandwidth to land us on the moon) we gain so much in ease of updating the site. The client changes their mind all the time and if we need to change the thumbnail size, I can do it in 2 second in the global css file, as opposed to much longer to track down all the instances of img tags in the code. I also feel we'll gain a nanosecond from slightly less code bloat.

I see a lot of older articles on the web that mention adding image height and width tags as a help to optimize one's site, but if we're doing EVERYTHING else in the name of speed, is this issue really relevant today with users having faster and faster internet connections?

We can't seem to come to any agreement on this... anybody have any enlightened and educated opinions about this, circa 2008?

My website's scripts eat up too much bandwidth. How do I resolve this?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 09:21:43 -0800

My site's cron tasks eat up a lot of bandwidth. Can I change the paths from http to local? Or can I move the tasks to my home server? One of my websites (the election one) runs a truckload of PHP to parse, mesh, filter, and cache an equally large number of external RSS feeds which are then stored and included in a reasonably lean (~10k) index.html. This creates a strange situation where the bandwidth consumed by the PHP (locally, but via http) far exceeds the actual bandwidth consumed by visitors. My web hosting provider has warned me about the excessive activity, but given the limited number of visitors, upgrading to a hosting deal with a higher bandwidth limit isn't really worthwhile for me.

How do I resolve this?

Current situation: a bunch of FeedForAll PHP scripts are executed using a Ruby-as-CGI script (which wackybrit kindly helped me with) called via cron at regular intervals, varying by nature of content: none-time critical content would be updated hourly, whereas latest news etc. is updated every 10 minutes (was 2 minutes, but I took it down a notch for now to avoid further problems with my host). My monthly bandwidth limit is 8 GB; actual visitor usage is a modest fraction of that, but the scripting alone was responsible for 37 GB (!) in March.

Several options:

1) The bandwidth is measured by the host using HTTP responses. If I run the scripts using local UNIX paths, e.g. /usr/gnfti/www/ etc., the scripts generate no HTTP headers and thus don't count towards the quota. Of course they will still incur server load, but I have discussed this with the hosting company and it seems they're okay with it if I limit the use somewhat as a compromise. But then, not all of these scripts seem to be okay with local paths, most notably the keyword filter (rssFilter.php), which is responsible for 25% of the bandwidth on its own.

Any ideas how to make it work this way anyway?

2) I have a home server running WAMP on XP. Could I run the PHP on this box instead and have the output automatically upload to the remote server via FTP? Most of the bandwidth is to do with moving stuff around locally anyway; the actual output is in the order of kilobytes. I imagine this would involve running some sort of cron + FTP client/scheduler on the home box, but my knowledge in this area is limited.

Could this be done, and if so, how?

3) Lastly, if you have any suggestions on how to pull this off aside from the examples above, that too would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or insight you might have to offer, guys.

Help me find a bandwidth monitor.

griphus — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:51:50 -0800

I'm looking for a freeware Windows bandwidth monitor that can be minimized to an icon sitting in the taskbar that displays a graph (think Process Explorer-style) of the up/down bandwidth. There's a whole lot of these out there, so if the HiveMind can help me sort through the crap, I'd be thankful. My Google-fu fails me on this, but I remember using one that did this that had a crippling bug in it that would cause it to just stop working, reinstalls be damned. I neither remember the name, nor can I find it again, nor can I find anything nearly as useful.

"How is that possible?"

daninnj — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 19:27:30 -0800

Is there anywhere I could find an old Qwest commercial? Around 2000, there was this Qwest ad on TV where a guy goes into this rinky dink motel in the middle of nowhere and goes to the counter and asks the girl a few questions. He then asks about entertainment and she replies something like "All rooms have every movie ever made in any language,``` anytime."

I would like to use it in a project. Is it anywhere on the interweb?