Higher speed, higher contention rate

corblimey

I signed up for a bband account with a local crowd here in Cork about 5 years ago. 2 years ago, they were swallowed up by a larger company. I kept my account, but things have moved on quite a bit since then. I'm now being given the option of sidegrading to one of their normal accounts or keeping things as they are. I currently have an X mb rate, and they're offering twice as fast for half as much. However, on my current account, there are only 5 users (ie, me and 4 others) and those 4 are business users, so I'm pretty much on my own in the evenings and at weekends. The contention rate on the account they're offering is 40:1.

Disregarding the money, am I going to notice a big difference between X at 5:1 and 2X at 40:1? I know it's not as simple as 2X at 40:1 is X at 20:1 which is 4 times worse than X at 5:1. But is there any way of figuring out how much worse it'll be before I sign up for the new account? I mostly use my bband for normal browsing and email, but have recently (re)discovered the delights of Usenet.

jor el

There's no way to know what contention will be applied until you get it. 40:1 is the max, though in practice if they gave you that all the time, then you'd get feck all. It all depends on how the network is set up and how they distribute traffic.