Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (225 mails)

["Alan Davies" <staff.asd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I noticed that Demon internet now offer better contention
ratios than most (all?) other broadband providers.

We are currently with pavilion (part of the easynet group) and although
speeds were great a couple of years ago we have noticed a steady
decline in service - which is barely better than ISDN rates around
Lunch times.

I assume this is down to contention - although we also use their
filtered proxy service which has been a constriction in the past
and I suspect that they use a transparent proxy on the non
filtered service (is there a way to test for this?)

Not only might it be possible to get better bandwidth but Demon
appears to be cheaper too (certainly less than we are paying Easynet
for a 2MB service).

Of course with contention ratios of 5:1 it could still be sluggish
if the other 4 users are also heavy on usage (as would be many schools).

They offer a 1:1 service - but at 600ukp per month it would be
not be much more to go for a leased line and get the benefit 
of symmetric speeds.

Anyone any comments on Internet access speeds (I know its not Linux specific -
although we do use squid as our local proxy on a linux box).

    
-- 
Alan Davies
Head of Computing
Birkenhead School