Broadband VI - Drop in Speed?

The speed on the $49.95 plan is rated at 500kbs. You do get a short burst speed of up to 2 mbs which can make your connection look faster than it really is when you just download/upload a small test file.

Jim

I have noticed a slow down too, plus some down time.

Chad....you're paying for the 512kbps plan....and you're getting 512kbps. If you want more speed, there is a 1Mbps plan for $99.
The 2Mbps burst speed lasts approx 30 seconds, making web pages download faster during normal browsing.
We made some adjustments to how the burst works for people that are constantly downloading large amounts of data using bit torrent. You are in the less than 1% of our customers that fall into that category.

We are on the 512kbps plan. A couple of weeks ago we were running a bit slow and hubby called and we were back up to speed in a couple of minutes. Hubby just ran a test and we were 684kbps on download and 719kbps on upload.

Serial2/3 -- stx-fre-edge1
System: stx-fre-edge1 in
Maintainer:
Description: Serial2/3 Cy C Association Circuit # 997-509x
ifType: ppp (23)
ifName: Se2/3
Max Speed: 193.0 kBytes/s
Ip: 65.113.92.189 ()

The statistics were last updated Monday, 13 April 2009 at 8:16,
at which time 'stx-fre-edge1' had been up for 96 days, 13:44:47.
`Daily' Graph (5 Minute Average)
Max Average Current
In 785.9 kb/s (50.9%) 156.1 kb/s (10.1%) 17.5 kb/s (1.1%)
Out 947.0 kb/s (61.3%) 186.3 kb/s (12.1%) 61.4 kb/s (4.0%)

`Weekly' Graph (30 Minute Average)
Max Average Current
In 1062.5 kb/s (68.8%) 161.3 kb/s (10.4%) 51.0 kb/s (3.3%)
Out 1046.2 kb/s (67.8%) 249.1 kb/s (16.1%) 147.7 kb/s (9.6%)

`Monthly' Graph (2 Hour Average)
Max Average Current
In 699.7 kb/s (45.3%) 174.5 kb/s (11.3%) 1128.0 b/s (0.1%)
Out 1334.3 kb/s (86.4%) 372.7 kb/s (24.1%) 4960.0 b/s (0.3%

2

So what are the changes to the people using bit torrents, like myself?

It appears that if you use bit torrents then they remove the "bursting" from your account. This is a rather significant change as basically all of your web surfing is handled by the initial burst including your buffering for web videos.

I put a call in yesterday to find out about getting the burst back but haven't heard an answer yet. Likely I will have to agree to not download the television shows I now download on a weekly basis. I will keep you posted.

Chad

Chef Noah, you are fine.

Chad falls into that less than 1% of our customers that eat up 40% of our bandwidth. So in order to maintain the ability to offer a burst special feature for 99% of our St. Croix customers, we have to limit those people who do nothing but download all day to what they actually pay for. The other option is to charge for usage like AT&T, but as someone stated in another thread, they had an $815 bill for their cell data plan, we'd prefer not to go that route.

Chad, I stated above we have a 1Mbps plan for $99/month.

On the suggestion of Sloop Jones I'm going to move this over here. Does anybody use a Slingbox/Slingcatcher? Can the STX broadband infrastructure handle this or should I look at a Sprint wireless card and create a network off that?

DO NOT USE A SPRINT WIRELESS CARD! Their unlimited plans now have bandwidth caps that are unadvertised, I believe 1GB per month which a slingbox will eat up in a few hours. After that I believe they will drop you if you continuously exceed their limits.

I use Innovative 1mbps DSL and it works pretty well...the key is your uplink speed which they give me a 1mbps connection on.

Sean

Beeski, can you please elaborate as to how burst now works for people that use torrents? I understand the need to strike a compromise in terms of bandwidth usage, but can we just get an idea of how this works? In other words, is this based on usage during daytime hours, total data downloaded (and is that on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis), etc.