upload / download speeds

[Mister Bushice]

I'm coming up on the end of my contract with my Clearwire provider, and I'm wondering about a couple of things.

1. Where is the best place to get a reliable accurate unbiased test of my up/down speed, for comparison purposes?

2. what range of upload /download speed should I expect to get for my dollah?

I did a speed test at speedtest.net site today, and I was at 683 / 200. Where are youse guys at? Am I a Jamook at dis speed? How does that compare with other available services for the money?

This service has cost me $27.00 per month with no limit to the number of computers on my network, and includes a monthly modem rental charge which I can get replaced for free if it shits the bed. The tech service is deece. Always an english speaking geek picks up the blower to chew the fat. I've got no forced sbcglobal or aol type browser interface to get internet access, and I've had to call the mooks only twice in 18 months.

So - do I come heavy and pull a Moe Green Special on these wiseguys, or do I keep givin' them the juice?

I want youse guys opinions. For real.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

I'm coming up on the end of my contract with my Clearwire provider, and I'm wondering about a couple of things.

1. Where is the best place to get a reliable accurate unbiased test of my up/down speed, for comparison purposes?

http://www.dslreports.com/stest" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
There is no better site than this.

[ElTaco]

I would say that DSLReports has been around the longest and probably has a great comparison to tell you what you need. There are 4 things I would look at.

Upload speed
Download speed
Latency
Reliability/Support

Sounds like your reliability/support is very good compared to cable providers I've dealt with in the past. If you want fast, go with some kind of a Fiber services like FIOS from Verizon. You can probably read up on some reviews to see if there is anyone else that is more reliable in your area but it sounds like that is not an issue you have to worry too much about.

You can test upload/download speeds and latency with dslreports going to multiple cities and you can probably find out what kind of backbone connections your ISP has to ensure they can provide the service you want.

The big question of course, can you get on other networks to test their speed. Also, the test only really counts if you skip wireless and the router and plug directly in because all of that will slow you down, specially the latency.

Also don't forget that Network is done in Bits and not bytes, which I think confuses people a lot.

I would say the ultimate question is, does your connection do/ISP do what you need? If it does, searching around will not save you much money but will cost you time and energy if you really do some testing and comparison. If it doesn't meet your needs, you may need to pay more for the speed that will, especially if you live in an area where you have limited options.

[Mister Bushice]

Does my connection do what it needs?

Good question.

For the most part, I have no problems. However, we are using this MS SQL server tied to am MSACCESS program and it gives me fits. I hate it. Slow as dry dog shit.

the DB geek insists its my connection, and that it's probably just "Timing out"

I know 683 / 200 is not a fabulous speed, but it's not dial up.

[ElTaco]

I assume what you mean is MS SQL server at your house and MS access running remotely over vpn? I'm not surprised. It would probably be slow over most wan lines, specially when you run it with VPN over crappy home router/vpn combo. One option is to publish the app as a web app and see if that would work better. It would be slower then an MS access to sql connection over a LAN but faster then MS access to sql over a WAN. Not sure what else would help. SQL shouldn't be all that complex.

[Mister Bushice]

It's a remote hosted mssql server. My interface to it is msaccess based thru my router and wireless modem.

[Dinsdale]

Verizon DSL

2815 down, 714 up, through therouter, with a couple of other browsers open.

Advertised at 3000 down, 768 up, and it's always delivered just that.

About $30 a month.

I do live right by the CO. My buddy up the street doesn't get the 3 meg deal, and I believe is still at 1.5.

Around here anyway, Comcast boasts better speeds, but frankly, my DL speed isnt a limiting factor. It's very rare that I connect to any servers that can saturate what I have now (sometimes places like Microsoft or Symantec or other big-ticket sites in the Northwest get all booyah), so I figure any upgrade is pointless.

[PSUFAN]

I'm getting FIOS in a couple of weeks, which should increase my speeds from 3mb/sec to 15mb/sec. We'll see.

I'm not sure why any rational person would look to rely on MSSQL/Access for web stuff. Is there some reason why you can't use better web technologies?

[ElTaco]

I guess it depends on what you are trying to do but PSUFan makes a good point. If you have an application built into MS Access, its easy enough to publish most of it into HTML and that should speed up your connection. If you are using Access to randomly pull out data and send sql statements that you build on the fly, you could once again build a simple web page that would allow you to pull out random data. For reports, you can build them in Access, then publish them as HTML reports and upload them to websites, if they are regularly/reused reports.

There are other questions too, such as where are you doing your processing? If you are doing most of it on your local machine, you are probably doing a lot of small back and forth communication between access and the server. Finally you could just used RDP (MS Terminal Services) or something like Citrix. RDP would allow you to connect to a machine that is local to the SQL server and then run your MS access on that. Citrix goes one step further and allows you to just publish an application, such as Access. It could even be done on the web directly without requiring VPN, which should further speed up your connection.

Finally, you can spend some money on a WAN accelerator. It can take a T1 to near T3 speeds for example, but I doubt you would want to spend $20k just to boost your speed between home and work.

[Mister Bushice]

I do not disagree with you guys at all. I was using a fully web driven PHP website with my own company, but I recently merged with another company, and that aspect was part of the deal, unfortunately.

However the perks of the merge far outweigh the outdated program I now have to use, but in time I will be in a position to convert things over, just not right now.

ET - Do you have any links to conversion options? I need to understand more in order to affect change.

As an overview, the interface is a menu driven msaccess 2003 db program, tied to a ms sql server that is remote hosted. The customer interface is all web based, and the speed there is good, the functionality is also good. No problems on that end, it's as up to date as it needs to be.

The MSaccess program interface is a backroom one for employee use only. It is used out of our own computer terminals ( we now have four offices in three states). It is used for billling, account set up, work distribution, etc.
I find the program to be tedious and slow compared to what I was used to using before, but as the FNG I am still settling in and feeling my way.

Any info you can pass along to easily take the command structure of the msdb and convert it to a web-based one would be cool. The more I know the better.

[PSUFAN]

We've had some success here with importing DBs into PostgreSQL, which is kind of like MySQL on steroids. You are not limited to PHP for development, you can still use asp/.net stuff. It might be worth checking into.

[Mister Bushice]

I've heard of that before, never checked in to it. Will do now.

I have a corporate chain to deal with now, but in time I will get my way.

Although I know more about php than asp, so I'd have to get the geek guy on my side.

[ElTaco]

Ok so depending on what you are doing, you have multiple options:

You could move the database or keep the current database. PSUFan has a good point about postgresql but really, if you move the database or even if you stay on MS SQL, it sounds like you will need to re-develop some of it. The nice thing in this case about staying with MSSQL is that you already have the client side built and its working fine so why mess with it? (I'm trying to talk business sense not techie stuff)

As far as taking your menu driven interface, and this is a quick and dirty method, but once you have the forms, reports, etc... saved in MS Access, you can go and do a save as and save it as an html page. It will create a page that will pull the sql data out of the database with the sql statements in it. Now you can use your application as a dynamic website instead of having to rely on Access. The problem is that I find MS office created web pages to be almost impossible to edit. They are extremely messy, not unlike pages created with Frontpage. This could be an intermediary step while you wrote a back end from scratch for the employees.

here is something that kind of looks like it may be correct: http://databases.about.com/od/tutorials ... micweb.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Of course you would want to ensure that it connects to your remote mssql database. This may mean setting up the ODBC connection on the web server once you export/publish the forms/reports.

At the end of the day, someone will have to create/write ASP pages. You could take the pages that Access creates and clean them up, but its probably easier to just write new asp pages.

[jiminphilly]

I'm getting FIOS in a couple of weeks, which should increase my speeds from 3mb/sec to 15mb/sec. We'll see.

I'm not sure why any rational person would look to rely on MSSQL/Access for web stuff. Is there some reason why you can't use better web technologies?

I've had FIOS for about 2 years now. What are your thoughts? Did you get the TV service too?

[PSUFAN]

Still waiting on installation, Jim. Actually, I've been less than happy with Dish Network of late, I think I might add the FIOS TV service.

[ElTaco]

I would totally like Fios but the retards can't go 100 yards in to hit my house yet. Stupid verizon needs to stop sitting on their ass and get it to me!

[Mister Bushice]

Damn.

I found out yesterday that my upload speed is maxed at 250. Fuck me.

I signed up for this service to help out a friend who was struggling to get by. It worked fine until now, when I need better upload speeds with this shit program I have to deal with.

Funny, but they don't mention they have a cap on upload speeds, only how fast their download speeds are.

I'm heading for another provider as soon as this contract is done.

[ElTaco]

Yeah that sounds very crappy, but you also said you have a wireless provider, so those numbers don't really surprise me that much. Most cable/DSL companies are battling for control which means they are throwing more and more bandwidth at people and then trying to fight the 'abusers'/P2P users. Personally I've always disliked Cable companies and prefer DSL, but I'm sure they'll be doing similar techniques soon. I would say that anything 2mb/s or above for download and 600 to 700mb/s upload is what I would aim for.

[PSUFAN]

Damn, FIOS TV isn't available in the city of Pittsburgh yet. So, I'll be sticking with the internet service - which will be installed Saturday.

[Mister Bushice]

Yeah that sounds very crappy, but you also said you have a wireless provider, so those numbers don't really surprise me that much. Most cable/DSL companies are battling for control which means they are throwing more and more bandwidth at people and then trying to fight the 'abusers'/P2P users. Personally I've always disliked Cable companies and prefer DSL, but I'm sure they'll be doing similar techniques soon. I would say that anything 2mb/s or above for download and 600 to 700mb/s upload is what I would aim for.

Yeah, that sounds about right. I have directv, and they have a bundled product, plus I have verizon phones, they bundle stuff, so between the two of them I should be up with a better service sometime this year.

The early termination penalty is $180 for my current service, so I'll probably look to get a 4 months free thing or some deal to cut back on that pain.

[PSUFAN]

FIOS is kickass.

[PSUFAN]

A month in, and I have no reason to change my evaluation. Actually, it's pretty amazing. We have four computers that potentially could be receiving data simultaneously. With straight-up DSL, we often had some slowdowns...now there's no noticeable bump in the Highway.