I recently set up an old 11Mbps wireless router (as an access point) I got from a friend in order to let myself get on the internet from the comfort of the couch (I had found myself going on the net less & less on my laptop because there isn't anywhere comfortable in the computer room, & the desktop is always in use by other members of the family).
I quickly found, while loading pages & such didn't seem to change, downloads & such were slower (videos you can stop & load I find I have to pause & let sit for a while, depending on the length, while videos that won't continue to load while paused, skip a lot).
Just for an example with numbers (as opposed to "really slow" etc), when trying to download a 1/2hr podcast of the morning show I listen to (just now), at about 27mb, on the wireless it is about 9-15minutes (to finish) and never more than 50kbps download (closer to 35 though). When I'm connected via the LAN cable (100Mbps connection) it goes rather quickly (my guess, not more than a minute or 2, if that).
However, the couple times I've downloaded things via Bit Torrent I've noticed they've gone a lot faster (ie: pretty much normal -- but again, I havn't kept a log or anything of the speeds). Example: I'm downloading a 2.73GB set of files right now & at one point it was about 42 seeds (ie: not many) and at about 240kB/s
Sooooo, I'm not really asking how to fix anything, I get the "browser-based" downloads are slower because I'm using an old router. I'm just curious as to whether there's something special about BitTorrent that allows it to download at the "normal" speeds. Is it because you're getting bits from multiple people across the web? (as opposed to downloading my podcast just from the radio station's server alone)
I quickly found, while loading pages & such didn't seem to change, downloads & such were slower (videos you can stop & load I find I have to pause & let sit for a while, depending on the length, while videos that won't continue to load while paused, skip a lot).
Just for an example with numbers (as opposed to "really slow" etc), when trying to download a 1/2hr podcast of the morning show I listen to (just now), at about 27mb, on the wireless it is about 9-15minutes (to finish) and never more than 50kbps download (closer to 35 though). When I'm connected via the LAN cable (100Mbps connection) it goes rather quickly (my guess, not more than a minute or 2, if that).
However, the couple times I've downloaded things via Bit Torrent I've noticed they've gone a lot faster (ie: pretty much normal -- but again, I havn't kept a log or anything of the speeds). Example: I'm downloading a 2.73GB set of files right now & at one point it was about 42 seeds (ie: not many) and at about 240kB/s
Sooooo, I'm not really asking how to fix anything, I get the "browser-based" downloads are slower because I'm using an old router. I'm just curious as to whether there's something special about BitTorrent that allows it to download at the "normal" speeds. Is it because you're getting bits from multiple people across the web? (as opposed to downloading my podcast just from the radio station's server alone)