ADSL Max/Max

I have been on a 2Mbps/128kbps ADSL connection and have been thinking
of upgrading to one of the new Max/Max options.

I checked my ADSL router and find the line speed 7616/160 Kbps.

The line connect speed has gone up nearly 4x on download and has not
changed on upload.

I want better upload speed but from this info it is not worth the
upgrade...


Is the new Max/Max upgrades Telecom is doing/offering still in
transition?

Anyone have any other info on UBS changes?

Cheers

Gordy

 

I wouldn't get too excited, you notice the amount of people complaining
about getting nowhere near the speeds that their lines are capable of.
A big difference between your line speed and what you will actually get .

 

This means that your download speed has already been upgraded to Max,
(which Telecom was doing by default for all Xtra customers) but you are
still on 128 for upload. Whether or not you actually get any benefit
from the improved download speed will depend on available bandwidth to
the Internet site you are accessing, which is mostly influenced by what
other people are doing at the same time, and how much shared capacity
Telecom is willing to let you use.

Try doing speed tests to these sites:

<http://www.nzdsl.co.nz/module-Speedtest.phtml>
<http://www.speedtest.net>

If you are getting download speeds around 6100 kbps from the NZ test
site then you very lucky.

I'm at a friend's place right now, and his connection is reporting the
same speeds as yours, but I only got 2200 kbps to the NZ test site. This
will be due to Internet congestion issues.

The fact that your line is able to achieve a raw speed of 7616 bps in
the downstream direction indicates that you have a very good quality DSL
connection, i.e. you must be close to the exchange. (The theoretical
limit is about 8000.)

The "160" figure simply indicates that your upload speed has been
capped. If you went to Max/Max, I'd expect you to get something in the
order of 700 for this figure.

Note that both figures reported by your modem are a little higher than
the actual usable data speed: multiply the figures by 0.8 to get the
actual maximum usable data, so your theoretical limit is about 6092 kbps
down, 128 kbps up (at the moment).

 

Thanks for the speed test links.

My results are 3395/127

Cheers

Gordy

 

It's an odd world. My modem reports 2.3 Mbits down, 160 kbits up.
The two speedtests say I am getting ~1.6 Mbits down and around 120+ kbits up.

Funny thing is, I have repeatedly downloaded archives from Monash Uni and
Optus' Sourceforge mirrors at speeds in the area of 200 - 240 KBytes/sec.

Considering that I am on a 1 Mbit plan, I guess I can't complain <grin> but
with all the new pricing I may actually be paying too much by now.

-Peter

 

You really do get a big increase in upload speed going to Max/Max. At
work and home I achieve 500kbps upload on nzdsl, and ~250kbps to our
overseas web host.

 

The upload speed is misleading. ADSL has some protocol overhead which
means that you don't actually get to use all of that 160 kbits. The
usable data portion of the 160 is only 128.

When I was on a 256/128 plan, my modem was reporting speeds of 320/160,
which suggests the actual figure is 80% of the reported figure. I don't
think it is as simple as that, and it doesn't scale to higher download
speeds. There is probably a smaller proportion of overhead plus a fixed
component (e.g. something like 5% for framing overhead plus 24 kpbs used
for a control channel).

I don't remember what figure my modem was reporting for download when I
was on 2M/128, but I was achieving actual speeds of around 2M from fast
servers.

I'm now on Go Large, and it is now reporting 4736 down, which will be
the technical limit of ADSL over my phone line. I haven't achieved
actual download speeds faster than about 1.8M since switching to this
plan so I haven't been able to determine the real limit. I expect it to
be closer to 3.5 or 4 Mbps. I'm only getting 1.8 because Telecom isn't
providing enough bandwidth to my exchange.

That's 1.6 to 1.9 Mbps.

An actual limit of 1.9 sounds about right for a raw line speed of 2.3.
You might be getting misleading results from the speed tests, due to
traffic shaping or network congestion.

Xtra customers were automatically bumped up to Max download speed
(unless they specifically stuck with an old plan which doesn't have a
direct equivalent under the new scheme). Some other ISPs are still
offering speed limited plans, e.g. Actrix now offers 256, 2M or Max for
download speeds; Max replaced their previous 3.5M plans.