What comes down must go upI have recently had a newsletter from my ISP saying that they are going to upgrade my broadband connection from 1Mb to 4Mb.
When I first bought this service, and I can’t remember when it was now, I got 512Kb download speed and 128Kb upload—and it was wonderful. At last you didn’t need to watch the clock as the telephone bill rose and at last you didn’t have to go and make a cup of tea while fairly ordinary things loaded. Last year they gave us an upgrade to 1Mb and, quite honestly, I hardly noticed. I am not into music or video downloads; yes, the MS monthlies were quicker but no big deal.
As I have already reported, last month I upgraded my hosting package. As a part of that I had to upload the whole lot again which, at the time, was about 60Mb. At 128Kb/sec I was up half the night. Now I am hosting my own search engine which means a regular 10Mb upload with the indexes. Which brings me to the point of this post.
No BY, I am not interested in your marketing exercise to upgrade my download speed. You are only doing it to avoid having to reduce your charges; as a side effect I expect that you are hoping to sell more premium content—pay-per-view video and Virgin music. What we need is a sensible upload speed—Look at it, 4Mb down, 128Kb up; that is silly. Even your premium service is daft—10Mb down and 384Kb up, I don’t think I want to pay double for that.
There are three groups of people (that I can think of) who need a decent upload speed.
- People working from home; things like e-rooms just don’t work properly like this, especially after being squeezed through a VPN.
- People who run their own web site or upload other content to the web. Everyone is encouraged to upload now, even if it is only the holiday photos to Flickr. The Web is all about content, so how do you expect to get it there.
- Those trying to use their home machine as a server.
Now I agree that No. 3 is daft. They are probably not competent and are the source of endless spam and other garbage, but don’t penalise the rest of use for the sake of them. You have other ways to stop abuse.
Webmaster
Hey, perhaps BY were listening? My download speed was upgraded yesterday to 4Mb—but at the same time, they said that the upload speed had been upgraded to 384Kb. I still don’t understand the skew but it may make things a little easier.
Not that I can immediately tell the difference of course. Server-side delays restrict the browsing experience far more than download speed when you get to these sorts of levels. I will have to do an objective test, like a bulk upload, to see if it is really real.
I really enjoyed reading your opinons on the 3 types of people that want to upload a lot of information to the internet using BY/Virgin ‘home connection’.
1. Home Buisinesses
2. Home Buisinesses
3. Home Buisinesses
I think that if you want to run a home buisness and have a proper buisness connection then you should pay for it and stop trying to freeload on the home connection.
Now I know that the original post is a few years old now, but 2 years ago they did offer packages for buisnesses.
Hi Thomas,
I disagree. I am not a home business, I am a volunteer on various projects, operator of a blog and owner of a (non commercial) web site.
1. Planning conferences with other members of the projects – true, rather specialised and not common.
2. Uploads of data for free access. But my original example of photos to Flickr is valid. People like Google are encouraging us to store archives and backups on their system – you can’t do that at 128Mbps.
3. I don’t do this but some people like to host their own web sites or mail server.
Now I would add VoIP which is necessarily 2 way. Upload of YouTube (which I don’t actually do) and WebCam (ditto).
None pre-supposes that you are in it for business. It s number 2 that I struggled with and, you are right, it was a while ago that I made this post. Since then it has been upgraded and I am happy with it now. That is the main reason why I will stick with BY as the upload speed is better than many competitors but it may not be good enough for others using other categories. I believe the web should be give as well as take and the packages we are offered don’t allow this.