[HKNewBi]

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Does your broadband speed increase if you turn off your Now TV decoder? Common sense tells me it should, as it shares the same pipe. Experience suggests it doesn't.

Anyone have the definitive answer?

Thanks

[KnowItAll]

Yes, it does in our case, speciallly if I have a high speed download going on from UKNova

[PDLM]

It should if the access network (i.e. the last mile of cable between you and the PCWW) is the limiting factor in the data stream you're downloading. The Now uses about 3-4MB of the connection so in principle switching it off should give you the full 6MB for internet rather than 2MB or so.

Unfortunately, as other threads have discussed at the moment your "6M" connection to PCCW only gets you 6MBits/s to servers in HK - there are simply too many people now downloading huge data files 24*7 which means that the effective bandwidth that you get to servers outside HK is somewhere in the range 0.5-2.5MB. This being so, turning off the NOW box ain't going to make much difference.

And for those of you who say "I want 6MB to anywhere in the world 24*7" you need to look at the price of network capacity. HK$1-200/month doesn't even come close to paying the cost of 6MB of international submarine cable, so viable businesses based on a "full time 6MB 24*7 to anywhere" proposition are going to need to be charging substantially more than Netvigator does. You get what you pay for.

[PhilE]

In recent days I've been getting consistent 750-800KB/s downloads for well seeded UKNova hosted TV torrents. Their community is pretty broadly spread (must be quite a few Asian expats using it), but probably most heavily subscribed in the UK.

By my reckoning 800KB/s = 6.4MB/s and that's not allowing for any overheads. To be honest I can't remember if I'm paying for a 6M or 8M pipe from Netvigator. When moving from 512/1M pipes I really didn't pay much attention!

Maybe Netvigator opened up some extra capacity to Europe recently. I've not seen those speeds on more US-sourced shows.

[KnowItAll]

PhilE : I think what happens is the public US sites are filled with folks who shut down their torrents and dont seed them. There are private sites (which I have no clue about ... ) where people report very decent US based download rates.

[PhilE]

If anyone is interested in testing the US speeds - try the House MD Series 3, Episode 3 torrent from mininova - is currently very well seeded (and leeched) - just kicked it off and am getting 350-450KB/s.

Ah, the wonders of SSH tunnels for working at home, from work, as it were

P.S. House MD is a great series if you haven't tried it and like Hugh Laurie. Series 1 and 2 are fairly well seeded.

[KnowItAll]

Phil : where did you get the House torrent from? It took me a day or two to get it.

[PhilE]

KIA - Mininova has it well seeded currently - the 15.7GB (!) torrent for Series 1 and 2 has 330+ seeds.

Try searching for 'House' and then sort by the column called 'Seeds' - or this link might work... http://www.mininova.org/search/house/seeds

[HKNewBi]

Originally Posted by KnowItAll

Phil : where did you get the House torrent from? It took me a day or two to get it.

Sign up to tvtorrents.com - they have House 1, 2 & some of 3.

Along with about another 380 TV shows.

[goodkarma]

KIA, I tried to use UKnova but gave up. I could not get it to run.

I downloaded TVU from Viidoo and it's great for getting all the US stations.