Naked Science Forum

Non Life Sciences => Technology => Topic started by: evan_au on 20/03/2020 20:50:21

Title: How is communications technology holding up in your area (with COVID-19 impact)?
Post by: evan_au on 20/03/2020 20:50:21

Like a lot of knowledge workers, I have been instructed to work from home whenever possible, due to the fear of COVID-19 taking down the entire workforce simultaneously.

I find that my internet is going very poorly "upstream" (towards the network core), but doing ok "downstream" (towards me)
- I am on Cable TV technology, "HFC" Hybrid Fiber Coaxial cable: This has very limited upstream speeds
- With more people working from home, upstream is a real bottleneck,  so people have trouble understanding me, especially when I need to do presentations with pictures and diagrams

It seems that the mobile network is struggling more than usual too, in the suburbs.

So how is communications working for you, in the current environment with COVID-19 fears?

Title: Re: How is communications technology holding up in your area (with COVID-19 impact)?
Post by: alancalverd on 21/03/2020 00:35:47

No problem. >100Mb download, 30 Mb upload, after only 15 years of grumbling at BT who finally installed fibre this year.

Title: Re: How is communications technology holding up in your area (with COVID-19 impact)?
Post by: chris on 21/03/2020 08:43:11

I'm on a business network, which is - theoretically - uncontended locally (which is usually there the bottleneck occurs) and on fibre from the cabinet to the exchange thereafter; I'm getting no performance problems as far as I can tell.

BUT, the ISDN lines that we're using for broadcasting (yes, that dear old 128k network is still refusing the die) is beginning to play up; fortunately, in some respects, the downstream is glitchy but upstream is behaving. This means our output to radio stations is fine; it's just what they send us that is sounding iffy from time to time.

Seems worse over long distance. Pieces for New Zealand in the last week has been pretty hard. World Service this morning was bad.

Feels like there must be a dodgy unit in an exchange somewhere...

Title: Re: How is communications technology holding up in your area (with COVID-19 impact)?
Post by: Bored chemist on 21/03/2020 11:48:52

I always have lousy connection by today's standards - the last few hundred metres are telephone wires.
But  it still gives a me about 1.2 Mbit/sec.
That's OK for watching telly + stuff; a bit slow for big downloads. (Ironically, I use my mobile phone for that).

But the connection to "work" with about 2500 of us all suddenly trying to work from home is flaky.
Yesterday someone summed it up by saying they thought the computers had switched to sending everything in Morse code.
Our IT folks are working on it, so a quick shout out to them for their work in difficult circumstances.

Title: Re: How is communications technology holding up in your area (with COVID-19 impact)?
Post by: syhprum on 21/03/2020 18:47:37

I have Virgin fibre  up until 10m from the modem Ookla says I have a ping of 9, download 90.69 and an upload of 9.99, I am not trying to do any serious work but looks like I could