[NCLUG] Re: DSL Throttling or General Congestion?

[DJ Eshelman]

Since there was a lot of discussion on this thread, I had an interesting 
experience recently I thought I'd share.

The other day I went to download an ISO using BitTorrent (Fedora 9, for 
those that really wanted to know).

I found that almost immediately upon initiating the download, my 
connection went to crap; ping times of over 2 seconds, dropped packets; 
horrible!  Oddly enough I could download most things internet wise okay 
and the various speed tests out there said I was fine.

I killed the transfer and things recovered... sort of.

I called Qwest and they got into the router to discover everything 
looked okay, but they'd send a tech out to check the lines.

The tech came this morning (on time, polite and even called first to 
make sure I was there, I might add) and found that there was some wires 
in the jackplate exposed just enough to cause some line noise.  He 
cleaned it up (should have charged me but he didn't) and put everything 
back together- BAM- I'm downloading at 10Mb/sec.

Long and short of it- I can't describe as well as others on this list 
obviously could- but as I understand it, ADSL2+ is very good about 
keeping a connection live by essentially 'throttling' a connection 
that's experiencing noise.  Take care of the noise- you're at full 
speed.  In my case, the S/N margin for the upstream was unacceptable, so 
I could only sustain about 254Kbit up, but even that was choppy.  Once 
my margin got over 20, I was sitting pretty.

So, in my case, unless my understanding is completely wrong- it's not 
Qwest that's throttling a lot of the time, it's the modem responding to 
the line.  If you think about it, this makes sense- a torrent download 
takes thousands of little packets swarming a connection to work; you 
really need ideal situations for it to work well.

If you're in the part of town that has had the fiber upgrades this year 
(half of Fort Collins), Qwest is rocking and I'm very impressed with the 
speed, but their service has improved a great deal as well.

Just thought I'd share this- ironic that Comcast announced today that 
they'll be calling people who exceed 250 GB per month.  Other than a 
pr0n obsessed roommate in college, I don't know anyone who would even 
come close to that...

Have a good labor day, everyone!

-DJ