UKGPL Season 18 (2009) Graduates Cup (67) - Spa (1967) - Nov 1

[Phil Thornton]

Phil, have you tried speed testing your connection?

http://www.speedtest.net/

Just for a comparison I am getting 5.61 Megs down and 0.36 Megs up.

Just tested it.  I'm getting 4.32 down, 0.38 up but perhaps more importantly 52ms ping to a server in Birmingham that is 100 miles away.

When I tested it against a server in Istanbul about 1700 miles away I got 4.39 down, 0.37 and 110ms ping

and finally against a server in Sydney Australia (10550 miles away) I got 3.66 down, 0.30 and 340ms ping

I'd be very interested to know how that compares to a known good GPL server

[Hristo Itchov]

Phil, have you tried speed testing your connection?

http://www.speedtest.net/

Just for a comparison I am getting 5.61 Megs down and 0.36 Megs up.

Ken, speed doesn't really make a difference. You can play fine even on Dial-Up connection speeds. It's the quality of the lines that are important, low ping, good sync and so on, I'm not really knowledgeable in these things to tell exactly.

Just tested it.  I'm getting 4.32 down, 0.38 up but perhaps more importantly 52ms ping to a server in Birmingham that is 100 miles away.

When I tested it against a server in Istanbul about 1700 miles away I got 4.39 down, 0.37 and 110ms ping

and finally against a server in Sydney Australia (10550 miles away) I got 3.66 down, 0.30 and 340ms ping

I'd be very interested to know how that compares to a known good GPL server

Your pings seem just about OK, Phil. I get similar from Bulgaria to such distances, it mostly depends on your ISP and where the traffic exits from the country.

As you've probably noticed, warp in GPL is much more affected by bad Quality bar (not sure what it means exactly) than by the Latency bar (which reflects the ping). Also frequent changes/fluctuations (i.e. each few seconds) of the bars can give a lot of warp. So even though your momentary ping may seem fine, it may be playing around during races. As for the S (synchro) bar I don't think that's a problem in here.

[MikeBeattie]

Phil

The other issue is if anyone else is using the telephone line for calls or internet at the same time.

I've just got one of the new BT Accelerator adaptors for my system, which fits onto the phone socket and is supposed to clear out ant crap on the line and speed things up, I'll let you know how it performs when fitted.

[bernie]

I think the qually bar is a measure of the amount of noise on the line , all lines of propogation have some background eletron noise plus other stuff that shouldnt be there (switching spikes etc.) the required signal has to be decoded from all the other stuff on the line , its done by using clever mathematics , checksums and things , but if the background noise is high the decoded signal gets broken and packets are lost ( My take on it anyway as an ex and long redundant television engineer )

 

 

[vosblod]

Just tested it.  I'm getting 4.32 down, 0.38 up but perhaps more importantly 52ms ping to a server in Birmingham that is 100 miles away.
When I tested it against a server in Istanbul about 1700 miles away I got 4.39 down, 0.37 and 110ms ping
and finally against a server in Sydney Australia (10550 miles away) I got 3.66 down, 0.30 and 340ms ping
I'd be very interested to know how that compares to a known good GPL server

Hi Phil, for what it's worth tested ukgpl6 and got the following;
1) Birmingham. Down 9.86, up 0.47, ping 24
2) Istanbul. Down 4.71, up 0.47, ping 89
3) Sydney. Down 1.58, up 0.37, ping 332

[maestro57]

Phil, have you tried speed testing your connection?

http://www.speedtest.net/

Speedtest now have a sister site called Pingtest, which measures packet loss, ping and jitter and then grades your connection.
http://www.pingtest.net/

[fpolicardi]

I also had lat bar going up and down during the race. Following Evil and even more Phil was difficult with their cars jumping ahead. Anyway good racing with them

Qual. bar shows the percentage of good packets transmitted and it affects more than an high latency to the server.

I have control of Team7 server that is rented on a 10 Mbs down/up line, upload speed is the factor for a server, and another server that runs on a good reliable line. I can see if one of them is available on a planned basis for Graduates calendar on Sunday.

Ciao

[Al Heller]

I've got a cable connection at home here in London (Virgin Media) so I thought it might be interesting to compare to the servers:
1) Birmingham - Down 9.36 - Up 0.49, Ping 19
2) Istanbul - Down 2.80 - Up 0.48 - Ping 84
3) Sydney - Down 2.59, Up 0.44, Ping 323

Just a thought but have you looked into your ISP's "throttling" policy? I believe a few ISP's are a bit cagey about declaring what they do but Virgin Media have at least been transparent about theirs - ie., for a 10Mb line, if you download more than 1500MB at peak time (10am-3pm) you get throttled by 75% for the following 5 hours  . Naturally the peak time download limits increase depending on how much you fork out  - the 50Mb line doesn't have any limits. But 'throttling' aside, I've been very impressed with cable as the connection has remained pretty stable & consistent.

[vosblod]

Speedtest now have a sister site called Pingtest, which measures packet loss, ping and jitter and then grades your connection.
http://www.pingtest.net/

Doesn't mean much to me but (ping/jitter/packet loss);
Milton Keynes - 25/12/0%
Bursa, Turkey - 107/9/10%
Sydney - 365/8/could not determine
New York - 96/9/0%

I have control of Team7 server that is rented on a 10 Mbs down/up line, upload speed is the factor for a server, and another server that runs on a good reliable line. I can see if one of them is available on a planned basis for Graduates calendar on Sunday.

Great if one could be available Fulvio

I've got a cable connection at home here in London (Virgin Media) so I thought it might be interesting to compare to the servers:
1) Birmingham - Down 9.36 - Up 0.49, Ping 19
2) Istanbul - Down 2.80 - Up 0.48 - Ping 84
3) Sydney - Down 2.59, Up 0.44, Ping 323
Just a thought but have you looked into your ISP's "throttling" policy? I believe a few ISP's are a bit cagey about declaring what they do but Virgin Media have at least been transparent about theirs - ie., for a 10Mb line, if you download more than 1500MB at peak time (10am-3pm) you get throttled by 75% for the following 5 hours  . Naturally the peak time download limits increase depending on how much you fork out  - the 50Mb line doesn't have any limits. But 'throttling' aside, I've been very impressed with cable as the connection has remained pretty stable & consistent.

Similar to mine Al. Didn't know Virgin throttled though. No naughty downloads between 10 and 3 then, not that I would know about such things 

[Al Heller]

Even worse from 4-9pm Tim - just a 750Mb download limit on my 10Mb line before throttling kicks in! Any other Virgin Media users here might find their policy interesting as few of the ISP's go out of their way to advertise such things:

http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php

Naturally all my downloading is scheduled to kick in at 9:01pm 

[vosblod]

Even worse from 4-9pm Tim - just a 750Mb download limit on my 10Mb line before throttling kicks in! Any other Virgin Media users here might find their policy interesting as few of the ISP's go out of their way to advertise such things:

Sorry digressing from the issue now but can I tap your knowledge.
Don't really download a lot aside from the odd GPL track but does streaming from i-player/4od and the like count if I'm not actually downloading it? Roughly how much would an hours worth use in Mb?

[Al Heller]

That's a really good point Tim - I forgot all about streaming vids. I must admit I'm no expert but a hour long programme from the i-Player is about 650Mb & I'm assuming when you watch a streamed video it is in effect downloading to a temp file somewhere. If that's the case - watching one of those between 4-9pm would put me right on the limit 

Not sure about the other ISP's but when my connection has been throttled it becomes pretty awful - dropping from 10Mb to <2Mb on speedtest.

[MikeBeattie]

The Download, is what comes down your line, i.e ALL the data, it's not what you save on your H/D

[Turkey Machine]

iPlayer, Youtube, even if you don't download it directly, it still counts. Virgin Media are bastards in that respect, so yes it will hurt any throttling.

[Ken Murray]

Yes, good points about ping and quality being more important.

I normally test to Maidenhead, I think that was the only one available to begin with so I just continued so I could compare past results. Just done the pingtest.

Result:Packet loss/ping/jitter 0%/32ms/4ms

Came up graded as A

I'm with Pipex, who are now part of Tiscali. When I went from 2megs to 8 megs I started to get frequent drop outs. They got a BT engineer to come out and he said it was the telephony interfering. The higher the speed the less stable the connection and the more prone to interference. He fitted a socket where the main BT line comes in that seperates my telephony from my Broadband and it has been fine ever since. My speed did slow down not long after the Tiscali take over but I complained and also did some googling. Seems like they were moving people on to a new system where they have their own equipment in BT exchanges. As ever in the communications industry there is a special abbreviation for it but I can't remember what it is! Anyway I kept at them and I don't know if they put me back on the BT equipment but it improved to the normal 5ish megs and it has been OK since then.