Thread: I've been "Shaped"!

I had a similar experience a couple of months ago when I was investigating a few different Linux distributions and exceeded my limit
.
A few days before the end of the month I was shaped from 512/128 to 72/72. It took me a couple of days to realise it had happened. It didn't even seem to affect my VOIP phone calls.

My impression is that the reason for that is that an old computer like mine takes more time to process and display the page than it does to download it.
That is certainly what the monitors I have running suggest. A typical situation would be less than two seconds network activity followed by three or four seconds of CPU activity.

That was particularly noticeable on my ten year old Pentium II 166Mhz. Now that I have moved into the 21st century with a seven year old Pentium 4 1.7Ghz, the network activity remains the same and the time to display the page after downloading stops is much shorter, but still very significant. It is still sometimes more than the download time.

So the reason you don't notice a difference may be because the actual download time is only a small part of the time needed to get a page up on the screen. Of course if you have a better computer than mine or a video card which is better than my rather ordinary one, that may not be the full story.

I'm on Optusnet cable. Download speed is abysmal (it's OK according to Optus) and far less than ADSL2. I'm on a 7GB peak + 14 GB non-peak plan. After that it drops to 56kbps.

I looked at a new plan Optus are offering which combibne my exuisting Optus phone and my internet. It also offers 20 GB (peak) download and the package is less.

Why haven't I changed? Well, after one uses the 20Gb, one isn't shaped until one has used another 2GB. The problem is that 2Gb is charged at 15 cents/Mb, i.e., $300.

As I often go up to the limit, this is not a good plan for me.

Holy Toledo Batman..........I mean Ron !
230Gb
That's a lot of bat data !
It's not all those movies you watch is it ?

You can test your internet speed here: Speed Test on ZDNet Australia I do it when on a new connection to see if it lives up to what the company says it should do.

I don't think I could survive on sattelite JD. It is so expensive for the amount of data. I am on bigpond and use 25 gig within weeks and end up capped. I use to have optus and got 60 gig a month and generally used over 50 of that but bloody telstra calculates upload so date just vanishes.

Xav

Fixed. Bloody crappy HP keyboard here.

I do like the fact that Optus don't measure my uploads.

Originally Posted by ivery819

It's not all those movies you watch is it ?

We won't talk about those movies!

Originally Posted by Xavie

You can test your internet speed here: Speed Test on ZDNet Australia I do it when on a new connection to see if it lives up to what the company says it should do.

I don't think I could survive on sattelite JD. It is so expensive for the amount of data. I am on bigpond and use 25 gig within weeks and end up capped. I use to have optus and got 60 gig a month and generally used over 50 of that but bloody telstra calculates upload so date just vanishes.

Xav

You can also use speedtest.net, which is where the figures quoted above come from. There are several others as well.

Unfortunately I have no real alternative to satellite (or dialup, but have had ongoing problems related to the local exchange). I am currently on a 500Mb plan, doubling this is not too much more expensive, although anything more gets pretty pricey.

I don't think the lack of change in speed of this forum is because I have a slow computer - other websites such as BOM, Google, ABC, have slowed right down. (computer is a 2.8GHz Celeron with 384Mb memory running Suse 10.2)

Shaping when you run over is a far better way of dealing with data overruns than is charging (often ridiculous amounts) for excess data.


John