No idea Fibre Broadband

[Access Denied]

This is a really stupid question that I should already know the answer to but an unhelpful search on Google has exhausted my limited patience. Is Fibre broadband still subject to the 10/100 rule?

 

[ECA]

What rule are you talking about?

 

[Access Denied]

The connection speed to actual download speed rule. My current connection speed is 20mb/s but I get an actual d/l speed of 2mb/s. Just wondering if it'll be the same for Fibre.

 

[Krazeh]

Actually your connection speed is 20Mb/s whereas your download speed is 2MB/s. They're different units. And yes, fibre still has overheads so your download speed is always a bit smaller than your connection speed converted from megabits to megabytes.

 

[SheepCow]

My VDSL (the type of DSL used for BT's Infinity-line of fibre broadband products) is connected to the little green box in the street at 78Mbit/s. Earlier I updated some games on Steam at 72Mbit/s (Steam says 9MB/s).

But it is susceptible to the standard "oh shit we've got more customers than our network can take" rule, so (depending on where you live etc etc caveat etc) you'll experience slow downs, e.g. right now I'm getting actual transfer speeds of 38Mbit (4.75MB/s) -- I'm still connected to the green box in the street at 78Mbit/s, it just can't get my data to/from the Interwebernets as fast as it can talk to me.

 

[wolfeeh]

not entirely clear what you're referring to to be honest, but my interpretation of your question leads me to say this:
my package is allegedly 100mbit/s broadband (Virgin). 8 bits in a byte. = 12.5 megabyte a second potential download speed.

I can readily achieve a total throughput of OVER 12.5 megabytes a second from 2-3 seperate downloads, Best I have managed to get from ONE download is about 14.3 megabytes a second (sustained, over an hour an a half) at about mid-morning, from iTunes. I initially thought that Virgin had bumped me onto the 120mbit package but I found this was not actually the case when I phoned them.

I queried contention ratios with them.... the guy I was talking to did not have a clue what I was talking about... when I explained to him what I meant in terms a four year old could have understood his response was "oh, we don't do that, but if many people in your street are downloading at the same time, your downloads may slow down" (Yeh, work that one out!?)

My Upload speed is allegedly 10mbit sec. It regularly goes just shy of 20.

I do wonder what the fuck they're doing, but as on the whole it's a pretty decent connection I rarely wonder for long

 

[SheepCow]

Mmm yes perhaps your question is the problem. Your connection speed of 20Mb/s (mega bits per second) means (assuming no contention and the remote end is also just as fast) you will be able to download 20Mb/s (meta bits per second).

Most downloady/browsers etc don't use bits per second, since it's retarded. They use bytes per second. There are 8 bits in a byte, so to go from Mb/s (mega bits per second) to MB/s (mega bytes per second) you divide by 8.

E.g.

78 Mbit/s = 9.75 MB/s = 9984 KB/s
20 Mbit/s = 2.5 MB/s = 2560 KB/s
8 Mbit/s = 1 MB/s = 1024 KB/s
512 Kb/s = 64 KB/s

Vaguely related - "Contention" is what often the reason you can't download at top speed. There might be 100 people that are paying for 100Mbit/s connections all connected to the box at the end of your road -- however the box at the end of the road doesn't have 100 x 100Mbit/s (10 Gbit/s) connection back to the core of the network, so if everyone maxs out their connection it simply can't get the data back to/from the network fast enough.

 

[wolfeeh]

Expanding on SheepCow's explanation, I should have pointed out that common contention ratios for "Home" broadband packages are commonly between 20:1 and 50:1 i.e. between 20 and 50 people can be sharing one pipe from the street. I personally am shafted by the fact that I live in an area with large proportions of chavscum on benefits who all have ten kids, drive around in audis and bmws, have jetskis on trailers in their front garden and all have 100+ meg broadband