Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Any way to increase upload speed?

I prefer to backup each evening to my f-drive (external hard drive) and the offsite backup.

I switched from a T1 cable (and was getting any where from 300 to 860 kb/s) to an RG6 cable (and getting 300 to 650 kb/s) but my imported items are getting bulkier so about 650 mb are being transferred.

When tested my upload speed, currently is about 3-5 mb/s but my upload transfer rate is quite a bit slower. The current upload speed is 3-5 X faster than with the T1 cable, thus the reason for the change.

Is there any way to increase my upload transfer rate when I upload my data to the offsite backup?

Only way to increase upload speed is to get a better connection.

For us low bandwith users, the best solution is to use an incremental offsite backup program for II like Carbonite, CrashPlan, iBackup, Junge Disk, etc. II will keep getting larger and larger. However the files on the inside rarely change. So using a separate service for the II, DATA001 (Signatures, etc.), everything else is much better. My advice would be to just use that service since you can backup your database as well as your files. It's much more cost effective and easier to use one service.

Thank you Sandeep, that is what I figured. I may have to get that T3 cable after all! But I don't think I can talk my partners in increasing the monthly cable cost from 80 dollars to 1000+ dollars per month.

Why is there such a difference between the upload speed test and the transfer rate? And with a different connection like fiberoptic, is the speed test and transfer rate closer to the same?

So you're saying your speed test upload doesn't match the actual upload speed?

Yes,

My speed test for upload says 3-5mb/s and my transfer rate when I upload offsite to AC with 650mb of data is 300-650kb/s.

I think there is a misunderstanding of units.

Speed tests often report the speed in terms of bits per second. While file transfers are bytes per second.

There are 8 bits in 1 byte.

3 megaBITS/second /8*1024 = 384 kiloBYTES/second
5 megaBITS/second /8*1024 = 640 kiloBYTES/second

Which is consisent with your reported 300-650 KB/s

Abbreviations:
Megabyte = MB
Megabit = Mb
Kilobyte = KB
Kilobit = Kb

I know it's confusing lol.

What is confusing me is that with the T1 upload speed test it is 1 Mb/s and with the RG6 cable upload speed test it is 3-5Mb/s but the transfer rate was quicker on average with the T1 but my data transfer was less than 350 mb when I made the switch from T1 to RG6 cable, so maybe that is why?

But thank you for the explanation, I did not know the difference in terminology with speed testing and transfers, but with my Woodford Reserve mixed with a little ice and your table makes it very understandable.

T1 is defined as 1.5 Megabit Symmetric Service.

The difference isn't in the cable. It's in the service. RG6 Cable is used by many cable ISPs like Time Warner. The difference usually lies at the interface level.

T1 is more expensive because it comes with a Service Level Agreement which basically means super fast support. Any time lost is money refunded. It's also dedicated bandwith. Cable ISPs can slow down significantly during times of congestion. They also can take days to weeks to show up onsite.

With a 3-5 Megabit upload you're way ahead of the competition. My upload speed is half a megabit at the office. I can't upload a 2GB backup file daily. Instead I upload a 150MB Database and whatever II were added that day.

So if I understand T1 will always provide 1.5 Megabit capacity so even during times of congestion there will be little if any slowing of the upload transfer rate. The RG6 cable has the potential to have faster transfer rates but during congestion the upload transfer rate may bog down.

Nowadays most cable is faster than T1s. But, all the bandwidth is yours so it doesn't slow down or speed up.

I am fairly slow:

42 down and 5 up. Of course, your net download speed also depends on the server you are downloading from.

I did not know you or I could edit like that. And I did not know there is a time span of 6 hours to edit or delete. Thank you Bert. I see the edit button that has been invisible until just now. So is your cable a T1?

Lol my speeds are much worse than your guys' speed. 5M Down 0.5 Up. Most people that buy T1s do it for the reliability rather than the speed. It's pretty slow compared to most offerings nowadays. $300-400 a month for a T1 in most areas. A lot of services like RR, DSL, etc. claim they are faster than a T1. They usually are, but if anything goes wrong or if it's running slow, it takes a lot longer to get that issue resolved.

With my speeds, you can see why I avoid cloud services.

Another common practice is to use one fast cable service along with a T1 line to ensure high speed and reliability without shelling out 5000 for a T3 line. Dual WAN routers are good for that.

Excellent! What you describe is in essence (I believe)what we are doing, the T1 is utilized as backup but our RG6 cable is the primary cable. I will have to see if we are running a Dual WAN router.

That's excellent. Too pricey for most people. They use a mix of DSL and Cable. You get the fail over and load balancing which is nice.

No, mine is cable. T1s are always 1.54 Mb/s both ways.

Bert,
If you tell me one more time about the T1 speed, I may finally get it! lol

Sandeep,
No Dual Wan router, just have T1 for backup, if needed. However if the T1 becomes unavailable, then we would use DSL as backup.

T1 is your back up? Ha. I'm still confused as to what service you have lol. So you have T1, Cable, and DSL?

Currently we pay for the RG6 and this is what we are utilizing. The local hospital has in the past, been providing the T1, but will not let us access with a Dual Wan router for potential breech so will not sign off on that scenario, but will allow access if we use their T1 exclusively.

If we are unable to utilize the T1 in the future (which I think is likely because of the current trend of hospital owning docs and if you aren't owned you are run out of town) then we would purchase the DSL to have as a backup scenario in conjunction with our current RG6 cable.
Our current RG6 cable is working fine and it took me 10 minutes to upload my 650 MB of data (II and AC) offsite to AC because my transfer rate was 650 kiloBYTES/second today, which is acceptable for me.
I hope I have the correct usage of units.

I am just learning from my wife about binary numbers and the equation utilizing 8*1024 to make the conversions and the reasoning why, so I plead for your patience.