Minimum speeds for broadband?

It goes down a lot. Half a dozen times from what I know

The network has nothing to do with the university, they are simply contracted to provide internet access.

Of course you could invest in a better service but what no one seems to understand is that it's a bad impression of the uni if everyone comes to live on campus and are told "Yeah the internet is shit, you should invest in something else". I say this as a view expressed by me and my fellow residents and students and I can't exactly go tell everyone to buy a 3G plan. For most students that is inconvenient and more expensive.

The speeds are not the only issue and that seems to be the only thing everyone is extracting from my posts. The service offered is slow, inconsistent and unreliable, and the service provider doesn't seem to care. That's what I'm trying to get at here.

People don't because you don't get the quota. I've been up at 5am and it's still just as slow.

 

Stop paying the $30 a month and move in to iinet or virgins wireless/phone. Split it with the neighbors to make it cheaper

 

yet that's precisely what you stated that you want to - what makes you think other people aren't doing the same thing?

I doubt very much the university really gives a damn about people's ability to torrent, as has been said before, and expect the service would work just fine if people didn't.

so how convenient is it to have the connection basically unusable, just as a matter of interest?

and what people have been trying to point out is your actual options, as opposed to what you'd like them to be. it's already been pointed out that it could be factors such as 100% utilisation of the link to the building, and what you can do about that is basically nothing.

your options are, in order -

(1) persevere with the ISP. get everyone to log faults with them. if there's a genuine fault, it gets fixed.
(2) complain to the TIO about the poor service and see what happens. if there's a genuine fault that hasn't been addressed, it gets fixed.
(3) use the choice open to you, and get a 3G dongle. yes, it costs more. yes, it doesn't offer optimal latency. your choices are to accept accept the available option or, or don't. you don't have any sort of guaranteed right to game or file share.
(4) suck it up, but for chrissake stop whining about your lot in life.


I wonder what would happen if the service provider proxied the hell out of all the traffic on the network and basically dropped everything except HTTP and mail. the speeds would no doubt be fine, and then everyone would be bitching about not being able to torrent and game - and I still bet people would be trying to use things like bitlet, too.

personally, if I ran the thing, I'd define an acceptable use point that utterly banned any form of file sharing, locked down all but standard HTTP and mail ports, and then block every streaming media site I could think of.

and then anyone found breaking the rules would be banned from the network permanently, period, no second chances.

result: network runs properly for people using it as intended.

 

Network admin should just "permit tcp any any http" and see things improve.

 

All the above is irrelevant.
Speeds, consistency, reliability.... whatever... my point is what have you done to isolate the issue to the service provider's network?

There is going to be a lot of different devices, cabling, software, etc between the edge of the service provider and the port provided in your room/whereever. The cause of the speed/consistency/reliability problems may have nothing to do with the service provider. Could it be something BETWEEN the service provider and the port provided to you that's causing the issue?! What testing have you done to find out?!

 

You're still not understanding the difference between our University allocated quota on the University network, and our Everywhere Internet connection. EI is a private paid for internet connection and should be treated as such, just like any other ISP at home.

Forget it.

 

then avail yourself of options (1) and (2) and stop whining here. we can't fix it.