does Shaw slow you down if you're using too much bandwidth?

[Darren Dirt]

Monday morning, apologize if my question is unclear or inaccurate.

I've noticed in the last 10 days or so that my Shaw internet is painfully slow*, like it takes about 5 seconds to upload a 900K attachment to my gmail... and I suspect it's possibly cuz some "flag" has been tripped due to Dionne and the kids occasionally watching marathon sessions of How I Met Your Mother on "WatchXOnline" ... even if they are streaming quality, that's gotta be a good chunk of bandwidth being used, and maybe appears to Shaw's algorithms as equivalent to bitTorrents or similar, right?

I'm not sure if anyone else has the basic internet from Shaw, but if you do and you've also noticed a ... noticeable ... slowdown in the last week or two, chime in and tell me I'm not crazy.

Oops, I totally set myself up there, didn't I?  




*not "all the time", just enough to make me go "huh"... if it was always slow I wouldn't be asking you guys, I'd be making an accusatory call to Shaw asking them wtf they messed up my service that has been fine for the last 5 years... which I might end up doing anyway

[Lazybones]

Most slowdowns I encounter are from my router needing a reboot or too many sessions being open from torrents. I hammer the hell out my line for days at a time and I am on Normal Basic shaw Highspeed.

[Thorin]

Shaw does not limit BitTorrent downloads.  A short while ago I downloaded a file that proves that if someone in Europe has an 80GB torrent and is connected via fiber-optic, Shaw will let the torrent go at max speed for several hours.  Max speed for my connection on Shaw's Extreme is 15Mbps, and I was downloading overnight at 1.4MB/s average (not quite the theoretical max, but that's as fast as the guy could upload to me on his fiber-optic connection).

I have noticed, though, that traffic on the network does affect download speeds from reliable, close servers.  I would not consider most Internet servers "reliable" or "close".

Your example of 900KB taking 5 seconds, that's 180KB/s, and you're uploading it.  For home connections, upload speeds have always been slower than download speeds.  Shaw's basic internet package (the one called High-Speed, not the one called High-Speed Lite) is 512Kbps up and 7.5Mbps down (see Shaw's product page).  So you should only be able to upload that attachment at 512Kbps, which translates into a theoretical max speed of 62.5KB/s (see calculator).  Your 900KB attachment should take at least 14 seconds (900KB / 62.5KB/s = 14.4s).

Even on Extreme with a 1Mbps upload speed, that 900KB attachment would take 7.4 seconds at theoretical max.

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All that being said, we started using a new hosting company for a web server last week and the hosting company's ISP (Allstream) had a major speed issue - a 10Mbps up / 10Mbps down line was only giving us 2Mbps up / 7 Mbps down.  So it's possible that there were actual internet problems causing a noticeable slowdown for you.

Very unlikely to be Shaw, though, I don't think they've ever bothered to set up bandwidth throttling.  Not that they couldn't, just that they seem to prefer to be known as the provider with the highest download speeds and all the goodwill that implies.

[Darren Dirt]

OK, good to know, reassuring... In hindsight I think it might even be the fact that Dionne's room has cable TV running to it now from the main floor, and instead of a couple of proper female-female connectors, I could only find a couple of 2-into-1 splitters    so maybe it's "leaking" (which typically degrades TV signal, might do same for internet who knows)

Also haven't restarted the router in forever, might do that tonight to compare...

Your example of 900KB taking 5 seconds, that's 180KB/s, and you're uploading it.  For home connections, upload speeds have always been slower than download speeds.  Shaw's basic internet package (the one called High-Speed, not the one called High-Speed Lite) is 512Kbps up and 7.5Mbps down (see Shaw's product page).  So you should only be able to upload that attachment at 512Kbps, which translates into a theoretical max speed of 62.5KB/s (see calculator).  Your 900KB attachment should take at least 14 seconds (900KB / 62.5KB/s = 14.4s).

Even on Extreme with a 1Mbps upload speed, that 900KB attachment would take 7.4 seconds at theoretical max.

I think I might have the 1Mbps upload, cuz normally I can tell Google to attach this 800-ish Kb file and it zips along in under 2 seconds*, just this past 5-10 days or so it seems to crawl (also Google News takes a while to load everything, so it's downloading too ... likely either my router, or the physical cable "leaking/bleeding" so just gotta close those open ends...)


*maybe it's cuz it's Gmail that I am uploading to, with their mega-wide pipe or something, but I swear it has never taken "7.4" seconds, until this last week anyway... I'm guessing it's showing the little progress bar *after* it's almost all already there @ Google.com or something, some buffering thing maybe)

[Thorin]

The math shows that 800KB over a 1Mbps is still more than 2s.  You have to be real careful with capitalization of that "b" - "B" is bytes, "b" is bits.  And each byte is 8 bits, so it matters.

I just tried a 9,106KB file uploaded as an attachment in Gmail, and it took 46 seconds.  That's 198KB/s.  Three consecutive tests on www.speedtest.net show that I have 9Mbps upload here at work (which is really cool, actually!).  9Mbps has a theoretical max of 1,125KB/s, of which I got 198KB/s.  I wouldn't say Gmail has a mega-wide pipe.

Anyway, I did notice that it didn't feel anywhere close to 46 seconds, even though I was watching the clock.  Most likely, you don't realize that it's actually 10 or more seconds, especially if you're also typing something in the email subject or body.  Maybe it's time to get those attachments, get their actual sizes, and try attaching them and timing it with an actual clock.

If you think things are slow and you're going to reboot your router, try hitting www.speedtest.net three times before the router reboot and three times after, and see if your times have changed.

[Lazybones]

Gmail suffers slowdowns at times, I have had some VERY slow uploads when everything else was fast.. They do virus scanning now which might be a factor.

[Darren Dirt]

If you think things are slow and you're going to reboot your router, try hitting www.speedtest.net three times before the router reboot and three times after, and see if your times have changed.

I will, thanks! I forgot about things like that, I have really drifted from my old days of being "all over the place" on the 'net, now it's more of a "means to an end" instead of an "end"