Internet service providers

[wingman]

Im sort of new to this streaming broadcasting, im not a total novice as ive spent 12 months on ustream so i know what it all does.

The question that i wanted to ask for others that are more experienced than me is about your service provider (broadband)

Now im in the UK and im on Virgin, my download speed or so they say on paper is 20mb but the upload speed is nothing like that, well to be fair, its like a limp lettuce at the best of times, and they do operate a whats called traffic management, where if they get heavy users at peak times, they cut their speed by half to those users for a certain length of time.

So whats your experience of service providers and limiting your streaming.

Although i will say this, to my surprise, ive just got this freeware broadband monitor which gives me a realtime graph of my download and upload usage as it happens and ive just watch a youtube video and it shot sky high, so i though im going to try this while im streaming. im watching the graph now as im listening to my stream via the net and if youtube was at 20 on the graph, my stream is barely 1, i didn't expect that

[markdeejay7]

Hi Wingman,
Just wanted to point something out......(just in case)
When you stream from PC to the streaming server, it is using "Upstream" and not "Downstream".
Depending at what bit-rate you are streaming at will depend on how much of the upstream you use. For me, I use 2 synchronous streams (broadcasting in stereo at 128Kbps - 41000kHz)......so I use around 280-300 kbps upstream.
My connection for ADSL2+ broadband connects at 1400kbps on the upstream so I have no issues at all.

You should be getting at least 512kbps on the upstream from a Virgin connection so you should have no worries.
The download management that is done at Virgins end through the peak periods should not affect you upstream......only you downstream.


Hope this helps

Regards

Mark

[wingman]

Hi Mark, thanks for the reply....
well im hoping Virgin will be good to me, i guess im wondering because ive spent so long on Ustream and that, as im sure you know, streams video too which is a massive bandwidth strain. Now im only streaming a simple 128kbs stereo with no video, so hopefully dear ole virgin will leave me alone..

Heres hoping

[Gavin]

It's extremely unlikely that a service provider will have a problem with you uploading at 128k unless you go over your monthly transfer limit (128k, 24 hours a day is just less than 40 GBytes I think, but you may want to check because that's just from memory, can't find calculator lol).

If you've been streaming video with no problems then you should be fine with audio alone.