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Thread: Telkom speeds

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    Full Member popayetwo's Avatar
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    Thumbs down Telkom speeds

    A year ago (March 2010) Telkom said it was upgrading its internet speeds to 8/10/12 Meg/s. What happened to this?
    Telkom's BASIC speed (THE BROADEST BAND!) is STILL 0.3M/s
    To download a torrent movie takes about 8 hours.
    My daughter lives in Auckland New Zealand and to download the same movie there takes 81 SECONDS
    South Afrrika has to be the armpit of the internet when it comes to speed.

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    Diamond Member AndyD's Avatar
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    Telkom are all talk and no trousers when it comes to ADSL performance. To download a full HD 1080p h264 rip movie would take you months at 0.3M/s. Streaming sports channels and even Skype are a no-no at those speeds.
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    Email problem Webmaster's Avatar
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    Wow, it's actually worked at "mega bits per second" which works out at about a 10th of Megabytes per second.

    or more as Google puts it 1 megabits = 0.125 megabytes. Why do they do this .. to confuse you

    I mean come on mb/s could mean megabytes.

    What Telkom are doing is trying to be smart. They realize their lines likely can't handle a 10mb/s [Megabit per second] speed.
    So they are testing new lines in selected area's. People in some area's paying for 4mb/s lines are being upgraded for free to 10mb/s lines. these lines give Telkom an idea on what they can handle and hopefully means eventually.... all lines will be upgraded. wahoooo


    I agree though we do seem to be the armpit for internet.

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    Gold Member irneb's Avatar
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    Everyone, across the world, measures speed in the amount of bits (on / off signals) which can be sent per second (whether it's good or bad is a ongoing discussion). That was true since the very first network ever. It's the most "accurate" technically, but not practically. The problem with bytes is it's the size of the end-product, not the amount of RAW data. A byte being 8 bits - you'd expect a 1000bits to equal 125 bytes? Right? Well it never does, at best you have some control bits and things like parity (or other error) checking bits, or sometimes the "byte" gets converted from 8 bits to 7 through things like Bas64 / UUEncode (especially with emails). In practise the best you can hope for is that 1 byte = 10 bits due to all of these things. Sometimes (if your connection drops a lot) this is even optimistic.

    And to add to that confusion, a kilobyte is actually 1024 (closest power of 2 to 1000) bytes, a megabyte (MBi) is actually 1024 kilobytes. While a megabit (MB) is measured as 1,000,000 bytes. That means that 10MB/s is "about" 1,000,000 Bi/s = 976 kBi/s = 0.95 MBi/s

    And then sometimes you even get corrupted packets of data (that's why there's parity / error checking) - which means that packet (which can vary in size depending on OS / Network Protocol / Settings / etc.) must be re-sent. So the time taken to download the corrupted packet was wasted.

    But there's even worse: Say Tel-Hell's 10MB/s line is "truly" 10,000,000 bits per second. So you'd expect to be able to download just under 1 MBi/s right? Well that's only possible if no-one else is using that line at the same time. And that the exchanges down the line can handle that speed without any congestion (from other such lines coming in), and that the line from the exchange to the following is enough to keep all the 10 MB/s flowing at the combined speed, and that the rest of the connections further on can do the same - right up to the server you're actually downloading from.

    So anyone telling you that your line to your house has been upgraded is speaking from behind a hat. That's just one link in a chain which could stretch several times around the earth. As an example, we've got a backup connection as 2x 4 MB/s ADSL lines for the office. Downloading while on them has never reached anything faster than 50 kBi/s -- thus about 500 kB/s (usually around 30 kBi/s though). That's 16 times slower than "advertised" at best, on average around 27x slower!
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    Full Member popayetwo's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by AndyD View Post
    Telkom are all talk and no trousers when it comes to ADSL performance. To download a full HD 1080p h264 rip movie would take you months at 0.3M/s. Streaming sports channels and even Skype are a no-no at those speeds.
    It's sad really. In 1986 the TOP dial-up speed (Async) was 1200baud while 4-wire synchronous service topped out at 9.6K using Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. This was then the absolute limit for speed on Telkom lines UNTIL they introduced Diginet with its 65K Sync service. This caught the industry on the hop and there was a mad scramble to get their servers upgraded to handle the huge speed increase. Telkom was then at the leading edge - WAY ahead of the pack. Today, with its pathetic 0.3m internet 'service' which has now been the norm for 10 years, it is at the rectum end of the spectrum. This has to be a management decision and with the previous CEO being a dimwit at his brightest, the lead was lost. The new chap has been in office for 6 months and has done nothing exciting. WHEN ARE WE GOING TO GET THE SERVICE PROMISED BY JACOB ZOOMA IN HIS STATE-OF THE NATION ADDRESS IN 2010 when he said we are going to get a "WORLD CLASS SERVICE?" We now have the cable capacity to handle these speeds over the insignificantly small internet population in SA so there is nothing to stop this happening except apathy. [/rant]

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