Downloading Starcraft 2
Last weekend I went to http://prazefarm.co.uk to play some Starcraft 2 and to install a WZR-HP-G300NH, to make the house fully Wireless-N. See the details on my WZR-HP-G300NH blog post.
To my surprise, downloading Starcraft 2 involved a bit torrent client and about 7G to download. The Internet speed at Praze Farm is roughly 5mbit down and it estimated the download at about 5hrs, which progressively got a lot worse as time wore on.
It was only much later in the night, I realised there was a "direct download option" in the client, which greatly sped up the download despite the warnings it would be slower.
The upload channel chokes the download channel
On ADSL especially, with its limited upload channel, when you start doing bit torrent (peer to peer) traffic, which requires you to upload, the connection gets unstable. Unstable in the sense the download channel become erratic. The best way to combat that this, is to deploy Quality of Service(Qos), which I've yet to configure on the WZR-HP-G300NH.
I'm a little pissed off that I have to setup QoS in the first place. Only fairly decent routers flashed with dd-wrt like the WZR-HP-G300NH offer sane QoS features. And then when you set QoS up you need to put in your ADSL limits. Once you've setup your limits on the router, say 5mbit down and half a mbit up, if the connection into that router ever improves (or drastically worsens), the router won't bloody care, because it's basically locked to 5mbit down. That sucks.
What about over supply instead of QoS?
My parents aren't heavy users like I am of the Internet, so they're on a roughly 21GBP a month package supplied by the excellent Andrews & Arnold (AAISP).
The BT line rental is roughly 11GBP, so lets say 35GBP a month for quality baseline broadband Internet. AAISP offer bonded lines for something like £42.56+VAT, which I would like to look into. This seemingly might double the cost of Internet, though if this works, I would be very pleased to get a 10mbit connection in the Cornish countryside.