UL/DL Rate question

[Alishe]

I live in a pretty secluded area, very few people around but I only have the option of one internet provider, Charter. I just seen on TV a commercial for 10mpbs for 10$ more than what I am paying now for "6mbps".

I torrent a lot and like to keep my ratio really good so I seed a bunch, but my upload rates cap at 60kbs, sometimes a tad bit more. So if I were to upgrade would I be able to reach higher upload rates? Also, should my current connection be capping so low? It doesn't seem like a very high number to me. What type of numbers do you all have when you set utorrent to unlimited for upload rate.

[Cephius]

First of all, Charter sucks. Get rid of that shit ISP if you can get something better. /rant off

Anyway, when shopping for internet, they give you two numbers. Usually 10/2 or 5/1, something like that. The first number is the download speed, and the second is upload. Find out the second number of that offer to see if it's decent.

The next thing to understand is that ISPs in an effort to fuck over the general population, advertise speeds in megabits per second instead of the megabytes everyone normally uses. A 10 megabit connection translates to about 1.2 megabytes per second. Basically just divide the number they give you by eight, and that's roughly the speed in megabytes that you get. Your current upload cap translates roughly to a 512kbit connection, so look for an upload speed of 1-2 mbits and you'll see a drastic increase in how fast you upload.

And keep in mind when torrenting, uncapping upload can hamper the speed you download at and prevent you from surfing the web or playing MMOs (or doing anything else that involves downloading data)

[Alishe]

I keep it @45kbs if I am surfing the internet, sometimes lower. Usally close it when playing MMOs. I put it at unlimited though when I am sleeping since then it doesn't matter. I hate charter but I have no other option aside from maybe DSL. The bits and not bytes part was very helpful as I didn't know they were out to mislead me that way, makes sense now.

idk why my charter randomly goes out for hours at a time usally around 2am either!

[Kryssan]

idk why my charter randomly goes out for hours at a time usally around 2am either!

That's because its crap, as mentioned previously. I also unfortunately understand the cable company monopolizing areas crap too, so sorry about that.


As Cephius mentioned, they mislead you on lots of things. Computer pieces/parts/technology does in several ways. AMD processors are not rated the same for speed as Intel, so the same speed AMD and Intel processor will not perform the same. Harddrives list size with base 10 instead of base 2, so you never actually get the full space of your drive. This is why I don't understand why people buy single large drives unless they're incapable of making RAIDs due to size limitations. Another scary trend I've been noticing is that harddrive manufacturers are tending to not list latency/seek/read/write times anymore on larger drives.


The highest I typically see on cable connections offered is 15/2, which is what I have. Some might offer more but I haven't seen it yet. There are speed testers out there as well you can use for free that will test your up/down speeds and show you what you're actually getting.

Since you live in a secluded area, you should be safe from throttling, as a lot of residential cable 'net in cities nowadays gets hammered by the companies supplying it during peak hours to make sure 'everyone gets internet'. But if you want, since you do torrents, ask if they throttle during certain hours. Might also ask if they do maintenance at certain hours/days to see if that's why you're getting d/ced at that time.

I also always choose business class, as for one I can't host my server on a residential due to port blocking and two they typically have better support and my cable rarely goes out. I understand however that some people can't afford that kind of option.