Usenet Speed

[#1]

Well as an update I swapped over from BBYW 3 to Pro to give it a try and at this time of night would be swapping gateways to see if I could get a decent speed. I thought I'd give it a try tonight out of curiousily my reader started straight away and no swapping gateways, and getting line speed, having said that I'm not counting my chickens yet I'll give it a few weeks and see where we go from there

[#2]

That's what I'd expect on Pro tbh.

[#3]

Thanks Be3G.
Mand, thanks for that. I understand that the expected speeds are maximums.I would expect to be able to get a usable percentage of that maximum though, which I often cannot as my tables are intended to show.
Changing gateways sometimes (but not always) brings an improvement, but it's generally small and short lived. It doesn't seem to be a problem with any particular gateway(s).
Cheers,
Rick.

[#4]

Hiya,
Yesterday fternoon we were seeing a few hundred Mbps extra in Sky Player traffic due to the cricket, which would explain the poorer speeds then.
We've got some further capacity on the way, which we'll announce when it's live.

[#5]

Quote from: tobykim

Well as an update I swapped over from BBYW 3 to Pro to give it a try and at this time of night would be swapping gateways to see if I could get a decent speed. I thought I'd give it a try tonight out of curiousily my reader started straight away and no swapping gateways, and getting line speed

Pleased to here this, I tranfer to BBYW pro tomorrow from BBYW2. The last couple of days have been useless during the daytime (Mid day to early afternoon) so hopefully things should br ok for me tomorrow - fingers and anything else I can find crossed 
Paul

[#6]

Today is looking worse that yesterday so far. I won't bother with a table yet but the morning decline started earlier and the 11am-midday hour yielded 80MB (<3%)
At the moment it's trickling along at around 0.5kBps to 3kBps erratically at a time when the supposed throttle is 512kBps. That's way less than 1%.
File corruption has already started with the continually dieing and restarting threads. Perhaps that is an issue with my newsreader software, but it only happens when the rate drops to unstable and very low levels. Should I want to get new headers in a group right now - forget it.
Like I said in the lost thread, I'm not really trying to be hard on PN. I know the demands that binary usenet can place on a bandwidth limited network. I have no problem accepting the throttled limits during the day to ensure higher availability of bandwidth to other services. I also still say that PN have the best internet packages available, at least for me, and their service has generally been very good.
However, if some traffic is being prioritised to the extent that the usenet service is actually unusable due to such a low rate as I am receiving, then something is wrong. Why is watching cricket on the internet (rather than a nice big TV) so much more important than using usenet that usenet is effectively taken off the air repeatedly?
Despite what some might wish to say, it is not my use of the internet (which I pay for as appropriate to my use) that is causing problems to other people. It's time that this old bone was buried. In fact it is their use of bandwidth-hogging streaming video on a bandwidth-limited network that is causing my service to be unusable.
Everyone needs to understand that the internet infrastructure has limited bandwidth. Usenet has always been a heavy use of networks, which is why it is rightly limited during the day. But streaming media is just as much a bandwidth hog if not more. Just because it is advertised on TV surely doesn't give people who use it rights to such a high network priority that they cause other users' internet experience to suffer.
Sharing the bandwidth between users is quite appropriate. Giving one group so large a share that other groups lose out is not. If streaming media loses some frames here and there, tough. That's life on the internet. It's not a TV broadcast network. At the moment, I am suffering loss of service and file corruption problems (leading to more use of bandwidth to correct) for their benefit. That is unfair.
Usenet is a core internet service that is used by millions of people and was one of the first internet services invented. I know - I was around then and have used it for many years. Prioritising it so low that it is practically unusable for many hours of the day is unacceptable and downright wrong. Throttling it to a reasonable level when there are other large bandwidth demands is fine, as PN does. But there should be some mechanism in place to ensure a reasonable quality of service, which at the moment does not seem to exist.
Regards,
Rick.
[/soapbox]

[#7]

I agree that usenet has been around for a very long time, probably before the actual internet, and TV streaming is fairly recent.  the problem there though is that most of the internet streaming is time critical, and TV downloading is not. nor unfortunately is Usenet.
That is why some ISP's are complainig to the BBC etal that they should pay for the privilage.
I do in fact watch TV live or PVR recorded, I have a freeview twin tuner+recorder and a Freesat twin tuner that can record 2 at once, while watchin a previous recording, I also have a Licence, I wonder how many of the Cricket watchers have a licence for where the PC is located? for that is the requirement for a live broadcast, but not for Arcived

[#8]

Usenet should have a higher priority.
If I look at a list of topics (threads) and I like the look of a topic, I can click on it.
Interactively, I wait to read this topic...
If I were to click on a web-link and nothing happened, I would understandably be a bit miffed.

[#9]

Text usenet is in 'Gold', Jeremy.

[#10]

Only if it's coming from a text-only server though - am I right?
If the server carries binary groups as well then the whole server is prioritised lower I believe.
So if you're reading text groups, do so from a text group only server. I've largely given up on most of the text groups I used to read (a lot of alt.sci.* for instance) due to continual spamming and trolling

[#11]

Sorry - I should have said, our news servers are given Gold priority because they only carry text groups.

[#12]

Quote from: Mand

If I'm honest I'm not particularly up to speed with the performance of lower priority traffic these last few days, although it's clear from the detail you've provided that the performance is far from perfect. I'll catch up with the networks guys tomorrow and find out the latest. One thing to point out is that the speeds on the expected speeds pages are maximums, and you will see lower speeds if the network is particularly busy. Does swapping gateway make much difference?

Mand
Nor are we
David

[#13]

Quote from: Jameseh

Sorry - I should have said, our news servers are given Gold priority because they only carry text groups.

You are wrong. 
Should you require access to 01alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pornstars (for example),
a mostly binary newsgroup, then it is available on usenet.plus.net.
At least I think it is - it's got 3,000+ line articles on it.
There are other examples...

[#14]

Quote from: Crucibleofevil

it's got 3,000+ line articles on it.

I wonder what sort of pictures - sorry articles - they are then 

[#15]

Quote

The last couple of days have been useless during the daytime

I haven't tried it in the daytime but it must be the same surely, the problem I have is that although my family left home they still come and use my internet, so I'm a bit wary of downloading during the day in case they have used my allowance which of course is less now, having said that I had a 30gig allowance before and only used 8 so I should be ok