[Discuss] Shaw problems/slow?

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-12-24 07:08-0800 brent sirna wrote:

>> On Dec 23, 2007 11:36 PM, Daniel M German <dmgerman at uvic.ca> wrote:
>>> Has anybody else have problems with their shaw connection?
>
> HI,
>
> If I encounter speed problems with my Internet connection the first
> thing I do is pop over to www.speedtest.net and check my connection. I
> use the Vancouver test site as my reference. Now I just tried my
> connection an I got the following readings.
>
> Download 26.3 MB/s
> Upload 972 KB/s

Those speed numbers are just plain cruel to the rest of us, Brent. :-)
In fact they are so much faster than I have ever seen before, I wonder
if you meant Mb/s and Kb/s?

I have been concerned with the consistently declining download speed of our
ordinary Shaw high-speed internet connection that has occurred since we
first got the service almost a decade ago.  For my area (Glanford), it used
to be 600KB/s for good sites, but it has slowly but relentlessy declined
ever since.  Last month it was down to 35KB/s or so during bad times of the
day.  When I brought this issue up before on this list, the general pattern
was Shaw was much faster in areas with a lower population density (Happy
Valley, Deep Cove) than in areas with higher population density (downtown,
Gordon Head, Glanford area). Also, the download speed very much depended on
local time of day with the worst period right after work/school when
ordinary local users are logging in and playing games or whatever.

Because of the download speed for Shaw depends on local population density
and time of day, I have attributed the declining speed problems to Shaw
network bottlenecks for certain neighbourhoods.  I am not talking about the
bandwidth of the cable attached to individual houses here.  Instead, I am
talking about the bandwidth of the link or links used to transport the
combined neighbourhood cable bandwidth to Shaw's Victoria office.  For lack
of a better term, I will call this the Shaw infrastructure bandwidth, and it
appears from the consistently declining speed that in our neighbourhood and
until last month they had not improved that since they installed the service
almost a decade ago.

That said, it turns out that Shaw is capable of improving their local
infrastructure bandwidth, and that has recently happened for the Glanford
district. I am now getting consistent 300-500KB/s download speeds from good
sites during most of the day with a drop to maybe 100KB/s during the
critical hours after work.  This is a huge improvement over what I was
getting a month ago.

So Daniel, I think you should complain long and hard if you don't get similar
bandwidth numbers where you live.  Shaw has proved (for at least the Glanford
district) that they are capable of dealing with their infrastructure bandwidth
issues so you should light a fire under them if they are not doing that
for your neighbourhood.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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