Download speeds

[RS]

On 16/04/18 14:26, Alan Milewczyk wrote:
> Hi Richard, many thanks for the reply.
> 
> On 16/04/2018 13:49, I wrote:
>> I have just downloaded two episodes of the second series of Salamander 
>> from hvfhd1/bi (Azure?) at 148Mbit/s.  That is similar to the HLShd 
>> speed.  It does vary with time of day, and can go down to 60Mbit/s.
> 
> Wow, that's amazing. I never got much above 60 Mbps even with hlshd.
>> Are you using WiFi?  That will slow your connection.
> 
> No, the only thing I use wifi for is my phones. I'm old school, 
> everything is hard wired Gigabit with a mix of Cat5/5e cables. I get 220 
> Mbps on speednet and, as I said, was typically getting around 50 Mbps on 
> hlshd a few days ago (and nothing has changed hardware-wise in the 
> meantime).
> 
> Since posting, I tried hvfhd2 and got 50 Mbps initially, but a while 
> later it was maxing out at around 25 Mbps. I do most of my downloading 
> overnight, so it's not crucial. I've rescheduled the timing of my 
> download batch files and I'm forcing hvfhd2 for now, so I'll keep an eye 
> on transfer speeds.
> 
Hi Alan

If you are getting 220Mbit/s on a speed tester it seems your connection 
is not the problem.  When my connection was limited to 100Mbit/s I was 
getting HLShd download speeds up to 70 or 80Mbit/s, and they have 
increased with the 200Mbit/s limit.

Speeds do vary enormously between CDNs and between modes and 
occasionally some programmes are slower.  In general I have found Akamai 
to be faster than Limelight.  I don't know about Bidi.

Where I am (and I think it may vary geographically)
hvfhd1 is Bidi
hvfhd2 is Limelight
hvfhd3 is Akamai

hlshd1 is Akamai

I see that the latest version of get_iplayer has a two-letter code to 
identify the CDN without having to use --info --verbose

Best wishes
Richard