FTTP Bradwell Abbey Co-ordinated Download Test

[#1]

Hi,
We're looking to do a bit of testing at Bradwell Abbey to see what happens to speeds when lots of people all download at the same time.
It would be really good to get as many people on FTTP (whether you're on 40, 100 or 300Mbps) to either download something or run a speedtest at the same time and report back what they see.
We want to repeat this a few times across the week if possible, doesn't have to be the same people each time, just need a few to see what happens. I'd suggest trying to get a narrow window, say 7pm to 7:05pm every night but feel free to post alternate times and we can try get people doing the tests at exactly the same time.
If you can help, would really be appreciated.

[#2]

Hi Dave,  happy to try this but as I am finding it is easy to download nearly 1GB per minute with the fibre connection :).  So keeping it going for 5 minutes could prove a challenge.  Also if I try this on 3 or 4 days in a row then it could chew up a large part of my Monthly allowance.
So instead what I suggest is that we pick a  single day, say sometime next week, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday and arrange for as many as possible to try.  Also I think there needs to be some identifed files from a source or series of sources that have sufficient bandwidth to allow for a number of us to download at a high speed.  What I have seen already is that a high speed connection does not always give high download speeds if the other end has limited bandwidth.  And as I stated earlier  the fast Fibre connections can download large volumes of data very quickly so for this to work there needs to be some files of several GB’s in size that are being targeted otherwise the timing will have to be minute perfect. I have found that downloading iPlayer programs to the desktop application is quick and I think the BBC iPlayer site has plenty of bandwidth.  The same seems to be true of Microsoft MSDN site (but this requires an MSDN account).  In both case I have been able to download 700-1gb in a minute so they might be candidate sites to use but I will let other comment on what they feel might be alternatives.
Gary

[#3]

Hi Dave
I'm happy to try this but won't be able to do any testing until after next week, so say from 11th June.
I guess it would be good if those of us on the Bradwell Abbey exchange with FTTP can agree when to perform the coordinated download tests using this post.
Cheers
Howard

[#4]

Am happy to take part.

[#5]

Happy to help with what ever you fancy
Si

[#6]

Happy to help as well.
7:15 pm , I just read this topic then next time I will try fit exactly into frame 7:00 7:05 this speed for my connection is that same all day.

[#7]

Hi Dave,
Happy to get involved! Your suggested 7pm time slot works for me.
It would be handy if plusnet could host some sizable test files to download as it would make it easy to monitor the throughput.
Speedtest results are somewhat erratic for me at any time of the day, and finished in seconds, so not the best indicator of performance for me to report back on!
Cheers

[#8]

Dave
Am happy to take part also.
Peter

[#9]

Thanks everyone, if you can just give things a go whenever you can would be appreciated. Just a speedtest will be fine as obviously you guys can do a lot of usage in a few minutes or I should be able to reset usage if you do download and look like you're going over.