Warning: contains math and abbreviations

From time to time I’m asked for advice about internet connection speeds and pricing plans, so here goes…

Most internet packages are lame (especially in New Zealand; but our ISPs learned their tricks from your ISPs, so we’re not alone).
Most internet packages assume you’re a consumer, but…
You’re not a consumer, you’re a producer (so you need upload speed, not just download speed).

Here’s what’s lame. Most ISPs show their speed (how quickly you can download and/or upload information) in kilobits (kb), not kilobytes (kB) (or megabits instead of megabytes) simply to make the numbers look bigger. To convert kilobytes to kilobits, you multiply by 8, and 128 kilobits per second sounds better than 16 Kilobytes per second, doesn’t it?

How to calculate typical upload times

Suppose you need to upload a 5MB (megabyte) jpg to your lab.

5MB = 5120KB
5120KB / 16 KBps = 320 seconds

So 5 minutes 20 seconds is your absolute best case scenario. Unfortunately though, that’s theoretical (another example of loose standards). In my experience it’s realistic to expect 50% of maximum capacity, so I would double the time, which means:

10 minutes to upload that 5MB jpg
16 hours to upload a print order of 100 jpegs
48 hours to upload a 1.5 gigabyte album order!

That’s asking for trouble. Disconnections, hibernation, and flakey wireless connections all add to the time … and explain why we spent so much time building “resume” functions into LabFTP – so you don’t need to start again!

I used that 128 Kbps upload speed as my example because it’s the speed you’re promised when you buy the $39.95/month “most popular” plan from NZ’s most popular ISP.

Something else to bear in mind: upload and download speeds are not the same: ISPs routinely cap upload speeds. 128Kbps uploading may be OK for (some) consumers, but it’s useless to a producer like you.

I want to encourage you to evaluate your internet package and do your own sums. Consider how long things should take to upload, or download for that matter.

Cheers, Danny

PS: Here’s a site where you can test your own speeds (and do your own upload time calculations). Note, it gives the results honestly, in kilobytes, not kilobits!