Average is 25K Mbps?

I think there's something broken about the Speed.io testing site. I just ran it from behind my district firewall and got superb results, here, see for yourself. If 25K down and nearly 15K up is average then my connection at home is pathetic.

Just for fun it would be a good reminder of how far we've come to throttle a connection all the way down to 56k dial up speeds again. But it would only be fun if you could just as easily go from that skinny little straw pipe and go right back to the flippin' storm drain pipe, maybe a dial or scroll wheel to demo just how insanely fast 25K is (that's 25,000 kpbs compared to 56 kpbs or roughly 446 times as fast).

And we're not even the world leader in consumer internet speeds. Nope, it seems that it is not unusual for Japanese apartment buildings to have their own fiber connection which can deliver 100K speeds without even breaking a sweat. What can you do with 100,000 kpbs? Stream porn from five sites at once while downloading HD movies and uploading live streaming video from all four corners of your apartment. And you'd still have plenty of bandwidth leftover to send an email to mom letting her know how much you love her. Isn't technology grand?

Bandwidth Hogs

I just enabled Wireless Access Control on my wireless network. The reason being is that my broadband access had been reduced to dialup speed crawling.

So I ran a quick line speed test on Speakeasy to confirm my gut feelings. My speed? A rather pokey 200 kbps download and 135 kpbs upload.

After turning on Wireless Access Control (basically I need to approve and add your wireless card to the whitelist or you get nothing) I retested the line for speed. The results? 2500 kpbs down and 423 up.

I've got no problems sharing my bandwidth with people so long as they don't hog it and so long as they don't use it to spam people.

Since I'm paying for my bandwidth, I reserve the right to use 99% of it whenever I want to. If you're using 90% of my pipe when I want to then don't be too surprised when you get shut off and blocked.

Granted its the middle of the workday and I should be working but I'm off sick today and need to be using my computer. Sorry, free riders, the free broadband pipeline is closed until further notice.

And yes, I do have password controls on my wi-fi. And yes, I do know precisely who was hogging my pipe on amateurmatch.com (I love perusing my log files and seeing what the free riders are doing).

[Update: Once I'd gotten my stuff done, I turned access back on for him. I know he's also looking for work and not having web access can severely limit that effort. But I'll probably have a word with him the next time we run into each other out front. Just to let him know what's going on and why his pipe got pinched!]

YouTube is Killing Teh Intarwebs!

The iPhone video threat: Can networks keep up?

The iPhone now accounts for my mobile web traffic than any other device in the US and it is #2 globally. And a huge proportion of users are using their unlimited (suuuh-weet!) data plans to spend hours and hours downloading and viewing YouTube videos.

I am not one of them as I probably go to YouTube less than twice a week and usually the only time I do go is to demonstrate how freakin' awesome the iPhone is. Yes, I did watch alot of YouTube this weekend but that's because of UFC 83 and my deep and overpowering need to see Matt Serra get the snot beaten out of him by GSP.

The article details some pretty amazing stats. More than 9 billion videos were served up in 2007 and YouTube alone consumed as much bandwidth as the entire internet did in 2000. Think about that for just a second and then pick your jaw up off the floor.

The issue isn't stopping YouTube, its making YouTube less of a bandwidth sink and suck. YouTube should look into incorporating BitTorrent technology to spread the bandwidth suck down. Or companies (and school districts) will continue to just block the site altogether which sucks because there's some superb content to be found.