Where to get faster upload?

jfriend · May 2, 2008

I have home DSL (384 kbps upload speed, 1.2Mbps download speed). The upload just isn't very fast when I have lots of 12MP images to upload. Since I shoot large events, it's not that uncommon for me to have 700-900 images to upload at a time (spread across a whole bunch of galleries).

I'm wondering if there are any SF Bay Area local options where I could drop in, use a high speed internet connection to upload the images in an hour or so and then go about my merry way. I'd pay for the privilege. Anyone have any ideas?

I plan on upgrading my internet connection a bit, but without going to a very expensive business line, I don't see any way to get much over 700kbps in upload where I am and that's still not what I want (I have access to Comcast cable and ATT DSL).

Andy · May 2, 2008

Is FiOs an option for you?

jfriend · May 2, 2008

Andy wrote:

Is FiOs an option for you?

I don't think so.

BeachBill · May 2, 2008

John,

Don't believe ATT if they tell you they are your only choice for DSL. Check www.speakeasy.net for availability at your address. I had used Speakeasy DSL for 6 years before moving to Las Vegas and they had excellent service, no gimmicks, and competitive prices. Unfortunately they don't offer service at my new address.

i_worship_the_King · May 2, 2008

What are you using to upload?

Here's the math I see...

Via Canon ~12MP JPEG= 4.6MB/file * 800 files = 3680MB

384kb/s=0.045MB/s

3680MB/0.045MB=81778 seconds/22.7 hours

(BASICALLY, you need to do some serious connection upgrading.)

My recommendation is to pick a local university, go to their library, buy a coffee, read a magazine, and enjoy their 6MB/sec uplink. All university libraries I've been in are public and have free internet access (except Meredith

).

Town/City libraries usually have computers you could feed a CF card into and no one would care, but I've found they skimp on internet connections. It will be fast for browsing, but you need the raw speed.

jfriend · May 2, 2008

BeachBill wrote:

John,

Don't believe ATT if they tell you they are your only choice for DSL. Check www.speakeasy.net for availability at your address. I had used Speakeasy DSL for 6 years before moving to Las Vegas and they had excellent service, no gimmicks, and competitive prices. Unfortunately they don't offer service at my new address.

Hmm. The SpeakEasy site says that they do offer service at my address/phone. I could get SDSL that would have 1.5MPbs up and down which would be ~4x faster upload than I have now. I can't tell how much they charge for that. Will have to call them in the morning. Thanks for the idea.

jfriend · May 2, 2008

i_worship_the_King wrote:

What are you using to upload?

Here's the math I see...

Via Canon ~12MP JPEG= 4.6MB/file * 800 files = 3680MB

384kb/s=0.045MB/s

3680MB/0.045MB=81778 seconds/22.7 hours

(BASICALLY, you need to do some serious connection upgrading.)

My recommendation is to pick a local university, go to their library, buy a coffee, read a magazine, and enjoy their 6MB/sec uplink. All university libraries I've been in are public and have free internet access (except Meredith ).

Town/City libraries usually have computers you could feed a CF card into and no one would care, but I've found they skimp on internet connections. It will be fast for browsing, but you need the raw speed.

I've done the upload math too. On top of your calculations, nobody actually gets 384kbps of real data up a line that's rated at that. I don't know if it's just connection overhead or spec lies, but the real throughput is always even less.

I'm using StarExplorer to do the upload. I can drop hundreds of images into an upload queue across lots of galleries and then just say go in one unattended upload session across many galleries. It also has a persistent upload queue so it keeps track of any images that didn't successfully upload so I can just try them again later.

Stanford University and Santa Clara University are the two closest universities. I wonder what kind of open internet access they have.

When I've been on the UCSB campus, it's totally locked down - there is no public access to the internet at all without university credentials.

DonRicklin · May 2, 2008

jfriend wrote:

Hmm. The SpeakEasy site says that they do offer service at my address/phone. I could get SDSL that would have 1.5MPbs up and down which would be ~4x faster upload than I have now. I can't tell how much they charge for that. Will have to call them in the morning. Thanks for the idea.

I have been using Speakeasy for years, to. I have a dedicated line (not paired with a phone), but not the speed level your looking at.

I am on the other coast, too and they do well by me. Very good people to work with Unlike a phone company their main business is the Internet, so they give much more personalzed and excellent service. They have given me much more help than Verizon (my local telco) and the telco has been nearly useless with line issue refusing to put in a new line when a tree has fallen on it as long as they can find one more working pair, even when they've gone throough three sets of pairs for me because of that tree!

Don

zweiblumen · May 2, 2008

jfriend wrote:

I don't think so.

I would be surprised that they don't in the Bay Area... but I'm an East Coaster.

You could check out their service page. Plug your phone number in and they'll let you know if you can get service. As much as I hate Verizon (topic for another post), this service is great (unless you are running a webserver at home like I am *grumble*).

aktse · May 2, 2008

Andy wrote:

Is FiOs an option for you?

From the little that I know, FiOs isn't not big on the west coast.

I recall having dinner last year with a relative on the east coast and was confused when she was talking about her work because I had no idea about FiOs and she's was basically in charge of it on the east coast. I think she said that the east coast was the test market...

BeachBill · May 2, 2008

zweiblumen wrote:

I would be surprised that they don't in the Bay Area... but I'm an East Coaster.

There are two major telcos in California, PacBell, oops I mean ATT and Verizon. Verizon offers FiOS. John mentioned his local telco is ATT so he does not have access to FiOS.

aktse · May 2, 2008

BeachBill wrote:

There are two major telcos in California, PacBell, oops I mean ATT and Verizon. Verizon offers FiOS. John mentioned his local telco is ATT so he does not have access to FiOS.

Thank you so much for the updated info! You peaked my curiosity and I had to do some searches on FiOS and California!
Not an official site but it seems that FiOS is only in Southern California.

And Verizon's press release in January just states a few more cities that were added down south from here.

Not in the bay area yet

jfriend · May 2, 2008

zweiblumen wrote:

I would be surprised that they don't in the Bay Area... but I'm an East Coaster.

You could check out their service page. Plug your phone number in and they'll let you know if you can get service. As much as I hate Verizon (topic for another post), this service is great (unless you are running a webserver at home like I am *grumble*).

According to the Verizon web-site you linked:

"Verizon FiOS Internet Service is not currently available for your address."

Thanks for the suggestion though.

BeachBill · May 2, 2008

jfriend wrote:

According to the Verizon web-site you linked:

"Verizon FiOS Internet Service is not currently available for your address."

Thanks for the suggestion though.

And if Verizon is not your local telco, Verizon FiOS most likely never will be available (well, maybe if Verizon buys out ATT).

Nikolai · May 2, 2008

John,
I hear your pain. I was in the same situation with DSL for a couple of years. Then I got Adelphia cable (which was later acquired by Time Warner) and it get up to 3/0.7 and sometimes almost 3/1. I hear they offer something like 5/3 nowadays trying to compete with fiber, check them out (or I guess Comcast?).
Luckily Verizon decided to fios (yes, it's a verb:-) our community, so now I'm enjoying 15/15. Helps a lot, at least midweek (extended weekends are still problematic no matter what speed your connection is

)
PS
Thanks for the S*E plug:-)

BradfordBenn · May 2, 2008

A couple of comments that might help
Do you need to upload 100% quality images? I have gone down to 80% quality with no problems. The big reason I did it was to speed up the upload.

Also if you are doing it via WiFi, even N or G, hardwire is faster. Even if you think it will not make a difference because WiFi is faster than your connection, there is overhead with WiFi that will slow it down. There are things like error correction on the TCP packets, there is the fact that the RF channel especially if you are using the defaults are being used by your neighbors also, so you will have interference... well I can go on.

Making those two changes have made the uploads for me a lot faster.

jfriend · May 2, 2008

BradfordBenn wrote:

Do you need to upload 100% quality images? I have gone down to 80% quality with no problems. The big reason I did it was to speed up the upload.

Also if you are doing it via WiFi, even N or G, hardwire is faster. Even if you think it will not make a difference because WiFi is faster than your connection, there is overhead with WiFi that will slow it down. There are things like error correction on the TCP packets, there is the fact that the RF channel especially if you are using the defaults are being used by your neighbors also, so you will have interference... well I can go on.

Making those two changes have made the uploads for me a lot faster.

I'm already at Lightroom 80% JPEG quality and 100Mbps wired ethernet at home. So I don't think there's anything more to be gained there.

I did think about down-rezzing before upload, but I hate to do that because that limits prints and is just one more process artifact between the original and a print and I want to be able to make originals available for download to the school parents.

jfriend · May 2, 2008

Nikolai wrote:

John,
I hear your pain. I was in the same situation with DSL for a couple of years. Then I got Adelphia cable (which was later acquired by Time Warner) and it get up to 3/0.7 and sometimes almost 3/1. I hear they offer something like 5/3 nowadays trying to compete with fiber, check them out (or I guess Comcast?).
Luckily Verizon decided to fios (yes, it's a verb:-) our community, so now I'm enjoying 15/15. Helps a lot, at least midweek (extended weekends are still problematic no matter what speed your connection is )
PS
Thanks for the S*E plug:-)

I really abhore the thought of giving Comcast any more of my business and when I check, their most expensive plan only goes up to 768kbps upload and that isn't even guaranteed (16MBps download though). The package is aimed at people downloading movies, not what I do.

Nikolai · May 3, 2008

jfriend wrote:

...768Mbps upload...

I'll buy that for a dollar..

jfriend · May 3, 2008

jfriend wrote:

...768Mbps upload...

Nikolai wrote:

I'll buy that for a dollar..

Oh, I wish. Minor typo in my post. It's 768kbps upload.

Nikolai · May 3, 2008

jfriend wrote:

Oh, I wish. Minor typo in my post. It's 768kbps upload.

Oh I know, I just got a crank out of it...

jfriend · May 9, 2008

Anyone ever had two separate internet connections from two providers. The main problem I have with uploads is that when I'm uploading a lot of images, my DSL connection for the rest of our internet use becomes almost unusable. As such, I can really only do large uploads when nobody is going to be using the internet at home. That generally limits me to 1am-7am which just isn't enough hours in the day to get long uploads done.

So, now I'm wondering whether a solution would be to get a 2nd internet connection (perhaps 784kbps upload) that could be devoted to uploads when I was doing uploads. That way, I could do them anytime without ruining the rest of the internet experience and I could run them 24 hrs a day if needed too.

Has anyone every done anything like this?

Nikolai · May 9, 2008

jfriend wrote:

Anyone ever had two separate internet connections from two providers. The main problem I have with uploads is that when I'm uploading a lot of images, my DSL connection for the rest of our internet use becomes almost unusable. As such, I can really only do large uploads when nobody is going to be using the internet at home. That generally limits me to 1am-7am which just isn't enough hours in the day to get long uploads done.

So, now I'm wondering whether a solution would be to get a 2nd internet connection (perhaps 784kbps upload) that could be devoted to uploads when I was doing uploads. That way, I could do them anytime without ruining the rest of the internet experience and I could run them 24 hrs a day if needed too.

Has anyone every done anything like this?

Just FYI: you know of course that with S*E you can throttle the upload

It won't make your upload faster, but will make the rest of your connectivity realted processes usable.

jfriend · May 9, 2008

Nikolai wrote:

Just FYI: you know of course that with S*E you can throttle the upload It won't make your upload faster, but will make the rest of your connectivity realted processes usable.

How does the throttling actually work? I didn't know it was there so I haven't tried it.

I was also wondering if maybe I needed a better router that would multi-plex traffic from different apps/computers better.

Nikolai · May 9, 2008

jfriend wrote:

How does the throttling actually work? I didn't know it was there so I haven't tried it.

I was also wondering if maybe I needed a better router that would multi-plex traffic from different apps/computers better.

It's in two places, one in Options, and another right in the upload toolbar (the middle one). It uses the "scribble" control akin to PS scribble lables (I wrote my one and used it in S*E in tons of places).

The way it works it constantly monitors the actual bandwidth usage per each data block it sends (which is done anyway to report correct JIT upload speed) and if it senses the bandwidth cap has been exceeded it goes into sleep for a certain (instantly calculated) period of time, thus releasing the bandwidth. Blocks are relatively small so if you throttle it down you'll get something like this:
~~_______~~_______~~_______~~_______....

I don't remember if it operates on the junior versions S*E, but you have a Pro, so you must have it.
HTH

jfriend · May 9, 2008

Nikolai wrote:

It's in two places, one in Options, and another right in the upload toolbar (the middle one). It uses the "scribble" control akin to PS scribble lables (I wrote my one and used it in S*E in tons of places).

The way it works it constantly monitors the actual bandwidth usage per each data block it sends (which is done anyway to report correct JIT upload speed) and if it senses the bandwidth cap has been exceeded it goes into sleep for a certain (instantly calculated) period of time, thus releasing the bandwidth. Blocks are relatively small so if you throttle it down you'll get something like this:
~~_______~~_______~~_______~~_______....

I don't remember if it operates on the junior versions S*E, but you have a Pro, so you must have it.
HTH

I'll give it a try next time. Maybe, I'll set the upload to 50% of my normal upload throughput and see how browsing works.

I don't quite understand why a S*E upload session kills the rest of my internet traffic. S*E is 98% upload. Browsers are 98% download. The channels are separate on my DSL line. It seems like the two should be able to co-exist without one killing the other. I know that the browser still needs to do some upload for get commands, but it's a really small amount of data.

Nikolai · May 10, 2008

jfriend wrote:

I'll give it a try next time. Maybe, I'll set the upload to 50% of my normal upload throughput and see how browsing works.

I don't quite understand why a S*E upload session kills the rest of my internet traffic. S*E is 98% upload. Browsers are 98% download. The channels are separate on my DSL line. It seems like the two should be able to co-exist without one killing the other. I know that the browser still needs to do some upload for get commands, but it's a really small amount of data.

John, I honestly don't know, I don't have this problem and I don't believe I had it even when I was on my first lousy dsl

i_worship_the_King · May 13, 2008

the problem with upload is that it requires a 'hey can I get' and a 'thank you' for every chunk of information trading places. It gets hairy when due to you uploading the ping jumps from say 100ms to 250 or even 500ms. Multiply that times the number of chunks it has to retrieve (every little image or data file) and its easy to see how surfing gets crippled.

sorry if this is too cryptic, I'm trying to let others sleep

Nikolai · May 13, 2008

i_worship_the_King wrote:

the problem with upload is that it requires a 'hey can I get' and a 'thank you' for every chunk of information trading places. It gets hairy when due to you uploading the ping jumps from say 100ms to 250 or even 500ms. Multiply that times the number of chunks it has to retrieve (every little image or data file) and its easy to see how surfing gets crippled.

sorry if this is too cryptic, I'm trying to let others sleep

, it's not, tons of IT pros here, John one of the most revered...:-) However S*E's using fairly large chunks specifically for this reason, so I don't expect it to bog download channel too much...

Bendr · May 13, 2008

The other thing you've got to realize is that companies love to quote speed in Megabits/sec instead of Megabytes/sec usually the way you can tell is by the b, and if it is capital, i.e. MBps= MegaBytes/Sec and Mbps=Megabits/Sec

The main difference being that there are 8 bits in a byte, so a 2 Mbps connection is actually closer to transferring .25 megabytes per second...

Good luck!

Nikolai · May 13, 2008

Bendr wrote:

The other thing you've got to realize is that companies love to quote speed in Megabits/sec instead of Megabytes/sec usually the way you can tell is by the b, and if it is capital, i.e. MBps= MegaBytes/Sec and Mbps=Megabits/Sec

The main difference being that there are 8 bits in a byte, so a 2 Mbps connection is actually closer to transferring .25 megabytes per second...

Good luck!

Ben, there is a good reason why they do that. TCP/IP has a lot of overhead traffic, so they always quote the raw speed to get a better rating, conveniently forgetting to mention the fact that quite some of these bits are "service" ones. Those 2Mbps will most likely end up being 0.2..0.1MBps as far as the user content is concerned, and I'm not even talking about implicit mime64 conversion which may affect those actual rates 50% :-)

Where to get faster upload?

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