Slow radio downloads - a bit off topic

[Jim web]

In article <546C7CB5.70505 at soulman1949.com>, Alan Milewczyk
<alan at soulman1949.com> wrote:
> On 18/11/2014 19:01, Jeremy Nicoll - ml get_iplayer wrote:
> > Alan Milewczyk <alan at soulman1949.com> wrote:
> >
> >> In that case, I'd better not mention the 156Mbps downloads and
> >> 11.6Mbps uploads I get from Virgin here in Greater Manchester.
> > My 60 Mbps connection is also a Virgin one; what actual download
> > speeds of BBC radio & tv programmes using get_iplayer do you get?
> >
> Not sure how typical these are but I just timed a film and got 9.6Mbps
> and then downloaded the three hour Today programme from Radio 4 and got
> 15.5Mbps. Subjectively, the speeds seemed fairly normal.

FWIW until a few weeks ago I was using copper from the exchange and
typically got speeds around 3 mbps. 

Then FTTC arrived and I upgraded to that. Since then the speeds have varied
wildly from time to time. Max over 70, min about 14 mbps. I assume this is
simply a matter of how 'busy' the system is at some bottlenecks.

For some years I've had a baffling behaviour where the connection is
dropped once a day. BT and my ISP monitored this and confirmed the
connection from them to my router was being lost and then refound a few
seconds later, prompting a restart of the connection. This produced a gap
of a min or two in useful connection.

This happens each day for weeks. Then vanishes for weeks. Then resumes for
weeks. Most curiously the time of day varies slightly from each day to the
next. It seems to follow being about half an hour before sunset and the
local street lights coming on! So was mid afternoon in winter, but mid
evening in summer.

Quite a pest when I wanted to listen to a Prom live via iplayer. Hence I
gave up and used 'listen again' instead.

My old connection also tended to become so congested in the evenings that
I'd get pauses in the iplayer anyway. (This is all for *radio* of course.
HDTV was hopeless.)

I've not yet checked to see if the problem continues now my connection is
via FTTC. No one at BT or ISP could explain it, although they could see it
happening in their monitoring.

Be interested to hear if anyone else has had the same sort of weird
behavior that seems to be phased with sunset! Maybe its vampire bats on out
local line. 8-]

Jim

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