Broadband Connection Speed

[anaxcrosswords]

Because my PC always seems to struggle with YouTube/Vimeo videos, decided to check the control panel to determine current connection speed (I'm on TalkTalk) but I'm still confused. According to CP I have 4 active connections:
LAN 3 is at 100Mb/s and is sending/receiving.
Connection 4 is at 400Mb/s but shows zero data transfer.
Connection 5 is at 400Mb/s but shows zero data transfer.
However, at the top I have:
WAN connection on F5Dblahblah. This is shown as the internet gateway and has a very large amount of send/receive data, but the connection speed is only 8Mb/s.

Is WAN a different sort of connection? Is it effectively the main one?

[Tuvok]

Try an online speed test

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html

[murraymints]

I get about 9 mbs....video fine...

[anaxcrosswords]

Did that, Tuvok. It's about 4.7Mb/s. A bit rubbish really. But I still don't know which (if any) of those 4 connections can be disabled. Or what makes WAN different from LAN. Or anything.

[Buenchico]

Forget the control panel. (It can only tell you about your computer's connection to your router; it can't tell you about your router's connection to the internet). Test your download speed using the BBC iPlayer website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/diagnostics

Then check the figure you get here:
http://www.speedtest.net/

Google give a download speed of 0.5Mbps as the minimum requirement for using Youtube but I'd be looking for a speed of at least 2Mbps for a reasonable service and at least double that for full reliability.

You might also like to compare results between, say, 7am (when there aren't many people online) and 7pm (when lots of people are using the internet). A big difference will suggest that your ISP has got a lousy contention ratio. (Most budget ISPs use a 50:1 ratio, so you're sharing your connection with dozens of other people. Decent ISPs have a 20:1 ratio or better. My ISP, which mainly serves business users, has a 7:1 ratio).

If you get poor speeds try:
(a) switching from wireless to wired access to your router if relevant/possible ;
(b) if you're using a wireless connection, moving the router closer to the computer ;
(c) if you're using wireless access, changing the router's channel ;
(d) if you're using wireless access, moving other electrical equipment (such as TVs and printers) away from the computer and router ; and
(e) asking your ISP to switch you from 'ADSL Max' (which is the default service provided by BT wholesale) to 'ADSL 2+' (which effectively gives you a doubled connection to the internet, thus roughly doubling your download and upload speeds).

Chris

[Buenchico]

Crossed posts.

4.7Mbps should be fine for using Youtube. If you're experiencing buffering, check that the hard drive doesn't start spinning at the same time that buffering occurs. If so, it's likely that your computer has insufficient RAM and needs to borrow space from the hard drive in order to cope but, since accessing the hard drive takes more time than using RAM, it can't keep up with the requirements of streamed video.

[anaxcrosswords]

RAM is OK - pretty much maxed what I could install a couple of years ago, but this buffering problem only started a few months ago. While buffering, there's no additional HD spin btw.
On YouTube audio is mostly OK, but video will run for maybe 5 seconds then pause and resume after 3-5 seconds.
Vimeo is awful though. A couple of seconds of video then a pause of anything from 10 seconds or more. It renders the videos unwatchable. There are other online video formats and their performance is generally somewhere between YouTube/Vimeo.
Offline video performance is OK and I've got all codecs up-to-date.
Just as an aside, I've recently noticed deterioration in offline audio performance. Playback in MP3, WMA, WAV etc is fine. But if I use Magix to convert WMA to MP3 there's always at least one tiny 'skip' in the resulting file. I get a similar thing when I import audio into AcidPro (a sample-based song production app). An imported sample will play OK for a few run-throughs then it'll start skipping, always in exactly the same place, on playback. I even did a test export (WAV) of a 10-second file and it did the same thing when I played that back.

[Buenchico]

It might be that something is hogging your CPU. Before downloading a video, open the Task Manager, then maximise it, select the 'Processes' tab and minimise it down to the taskbar. (You need to do it before any problems occur as opening the Task Manager when the CPU is busy can take forever).

Then, while downloading a 'sticky' video, bring up the Task Manager to see if anything unusual is occurring. Most obviously, anything using nearly 100% of the CPU needs to be examined carefully but also look for anything which is causing a 'Mem Usage' figure to constantly change, even if the figure shown is actually quite low.

Further, remember that adware and other forms of malware can slow things down on your computer. Download, install and run the free version of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware to see if anything shows up:
http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free/
(NB: When installing, take care to deselect the pre-checked option to install a trial version of the 'PRO' product).

[galeck1947]

To use YouTube you need to have an internet connection that has a good bandwidth . I would contact your ISP and have them run a test on your download and upload speeds . If they are not in the range that you are paying for then they will have to correct it for you.